stackless, uthreads, and GUIs

[Johann Hibschman]

Fernando Pereira writes:

> In article <slrn8dgdru.dk5.neelk at brick.cswv.com>, Neel Krishnaswami
> <neelk at brick.cswv.com> wrote:
>> 
>> There is a paper describing precisely this idea called "Escaping the
>> Tyranny of the Event Loop: an Alternative Control Structure for
>> Multi-threaded GUIs," by Matthew Fuchs. You can find it at
>> 
>> http://www.cs.nyu.edu/phd_students/fuchs/

On a quick overview, that paper looks like fun.  Thanks for the
reference.  I'm reading it now.

>> You may also be interested in reading about Fudgets, a purely
>> functional GUI toolkit for Haskell. This one is a bit mind-blowing,
>> though:
>> 
>> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/ComputingScience/Research/Functional/Fudgets/

I looked at it briefly, but I've never really worked with Haskell, so
I've put it on the back burner.

> A related, earlier, and simpler idea, based on ideas from CSP and
> Esterel is Cardelli & Pike's "Squeak: a language for communicating with
> mice", Proc. Twelfth ACM Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and
> Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), 1985,
> <http://research.microsoft.com/Users/luca/Papers/Squeak.pdf>. It might
> be a cool exercise to create a uthreads implementation of these ideas.

That also seems fun; I've heard many things of Squeak, but I haven't
read the paper before.

Alas, if I keep playing with everyone else's thesis research, I'll
never get my own done.  A pox upon over-specialization!

-- 
Johann Hibschman                           johann at physics.berkeley.edu