[Haskell-cafe] Language support for imperative code. Was: Re: monad subexpressions

[Hugh Perkins]

On 8/8/07, Brian Hulley <brianh at metamilk.com> wrote:
>
> In contrast, all the pure functional GUIs that I've seen are just
> wrappers around someone else's imperative code, and moreover, they
> exchange the simplicity of the object oriented imperative API for a
> veritable mindstorm of unbelievably heavy, clunky, slow, inefficient,
> inextensible, hard to understand encodings that seem to me to have the
> effect of turning a high level language into some kind of circuit board
> (I'm thinking of arrows etc).
>
> In defense of Haskell (wow!), note that imperative languages are not
without problems in GUIs.  In a multithreaded environment, typically only
one thread is allowed to manage the GUI, and then you typically need to set
up some sort of message-passing system to communicate between this thread
and the others AFAIK?  This is a total PITA, so if someone has a solution
for this that would rock :-)

Question: to what extent do the Haskell wrappers around gtk and wxWidgets
suffer from this problem?  I mean, I havent tried them, so it's a genuine
question.

(Note: off the top of my head, in an imperative language, I guess one could
use some sort of generator to take an interface and generate the message
classes, and marshalling classes automatically)

(Disclaimer: I havent really searched very hard for ways to handle threading
in GUIs in imperative languages, since mostly I either use web pages as the
visual interface, which avoids around the problem, or use a single thread,
which also avoids the problem)
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