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

[James Noble]

Hi Michael

On 26/09/2012, at 14:18 PM, Michael Homer wrote:

> 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>.

I hope that - at some time - we can have a common substrate (either base on processing or on our own design)
that can run across both - but we're not there yet. 
I don't think it would be at all hard to mock up a processing interfrace onto of the GTK  
especially given what I find here: https://github.com/mwh/grace-gtk


so there is an interesting question as to whether the right way to do this is with a lower level common interface
and then grace implementations of libraries on top of that, or just write two different grace libraries 
(one over processing/js, one over 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.

so that only works on the "native" aka C backend, right?

J


> -Michael
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