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

[Michael Homer]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 12:38 PM, Kim Bruce <kim at cs.pomona.edu> wrote:
> 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.
> 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.
It has never been integrated in the first place. There is no native
Processing library. I do have prototype GTK+ bindings that run
natively: <https://github.com/mwh/grace-gtk>.
> 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.
JavaScript is always single-threaded. There is River Trail that
supports certain kinds of concurrency but I think it's data-parallel
only and so couldn't really help you here.

There is a hacky pthreads module but it breaks in a lot of
circumstances at the moment, although you can try it if you like. I
have attached a patch for it on top of master (interface: def thrd =
pthreads.create { some code } ; thrd.join). I'm not sure how often it
breaks these days - the runtime isn't really ready for it, but I did
make some more things thread-local for it so it's not as bad as it
was. You can try it out anyway - it might be a good enough start for
what you're doing.
-Michael
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