stackless, uthreads, and GUIs

[Johann Hibschman]

Will Ware writes:

> Johann Hibschman (johann at physics.berkeley.edu) wrote:
>> I was wondering if anyone has experimented with using stackless to
>> implement guis.  I haven't played with the package much myself (yet),
>> but it seems like you could write something nice using continuations
>> to implement dialog boxes, and so on.

> I've been very slowly starting to put together a Pacman-style game
> using microthreads, where each of the four monsters gets a thread.
> I haven't given any thought to applying microthreads to the issue
> of dialog boxes and event loops, but it definitely sounds like a
> possible application. If you're on a Unix box, you'll find everything
> you need at http://world.std.com/~wware/uthread.html
> I think there may be changes in my tarball that haven't yet made it
> into the Windows version of Stackless Python, so I can't guarantee that
> a Windows build would work.

I've downloaded the package, but it will be a while before I have
enough free time to play much with it.

There was some murmuring a few weeks ago about Stackless's "Killer
App."  I'm just wondering if a ridiculously easy-to-program GUI
wrapper which used these continuation-passing ideas would be it.
Probably not, since the installed base of Tkinter is so large.

I'll keep it on a back burner, along with my editor idea.  (My, things
are getting quite cluttered back there!)  (And this *does* seem like a
good way around emacs's annoying single-threadedness.)

-- 
Johann Hibschman                           johann at physics.berkeley.edu