[Grace-core] My wishes/desires for Grace this fall

[Kim Bruce]

Hi,

I'd like to write more Grace programs this fall, which will entail me working further on a Grace equivalent of the objectdraw library and making sure that event-driven programming and concurrency both work.  

Currently I have a rudimentary implementation of the objectdraw library done (though it badly needs further debugging), all built on the Grace Processing bindings (which includes support for event-driven programming).  This is sitting in the folder ObjectdrawCode in the top level of the shared repository.  I've also written an Animator module that allows some concurrent processing (all faked, of course) so that I can perform animations while the system remains responsive.

To continue this work I would appreciate (PLEASE!) the following help from the folks in New Zealand:

1.  Reintegrate the processing support into the compiler, for either (though ideally both) back end.

2.  Provide some set of bindings in either (ideally both) backends so that I could write libraries for true concurrency to be used in Grace.  My first library will be to support shared memory concurrency using constructs like those used in Habanero Java/Scala (the following paper gives a nice overview of Habanero Scala:  http://days2012.scala-lang.org/sites/days2012/files/imam_habanero.pdf).

I am hopeful that the first will be easy to restore as it was going this summer.  Once there are primitives (probably relatively low-level) that can be used, I hope to be able to write the Habanero-style libraries myself or get a student engaged next summer.

At the moment I'm not sure whether we're going to be making much more progress on the DrRacket implementation before next summer.  I have a Sophomore about to start working on it, but he doesn't know much about programming languages, so progress will likely be slow.  However, I'll have a senior working next semester either on DrRacket or on the parallelism constructs.

If someone can provide the basic facilities, I intend to write most of the programs in my current text book (I'm teaching from it this semester).  While I'll probably want to teach Grace differently than Java, I suspect I'll want to use many of the same programs or programs that do similar things.  Thus I think that will be productive.  My goal is to teach a short course to novice high school students this summer.

Thanks to all for your help in building this infrastructure.

Kim