Re: Ada-Oriented GUI

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net> wrote in message 
news:0a1e0664-f657-4596-9672-5440ebe4caf2@googlegroups.com...
...
>I never said that it wouldn't be.  I was saying that rarely is a design
>tied to absolutely running nontrivial amounts of non-UI code on the Main 
>thread.

Conventional sequential programs ran all of their code (UI and otherwise) on 
a single thread.

Requiring the program to be executed around the GUI forces anything 
substantial into tasks (threads), with all of the problems that entails 
(deadlock/livelock/data races/nondeterminism/required synchronization). 
Since Ada already defines the purpose and definition of the environment task 
(what you're calling the main thread), requiring using it for the GUI forced 
the entire program to be used by the GUI. And the GUI is necessarily a tiny 
part of any program that Ada is very appropriate for (that is, programs that 
need to be close to the metal and/or verifiable - a GUI itself being neither 
of these).

The problem with Claw was that it implicitly dragged those tasking issues 
into even sequential programs. Insisting on the GUI being primary makes 
those problems even worse. I'd like to see a design where the GUI was truly 
secondary (I couldn't figure it out, and I'm done caring personally).

                   Randy.