[Haskell-cafe] GUI programming

[Victor Nazarov]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 9:54 PM, Mario Blažević <mblazevic at stilo.com> wrote:
> Victor Nazarov wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've been writing some GUI application with Gtk2hs. It's an
>> interpreter for lambda-calculus and combinatory logic, it's GPL and if
>> you interested I can share it with cafe.
>>
>> The problem is that the GUI code has become very ugly and I'm tempted
>> to rewrite it totally. I've been looking forward to the FRP stuff, but
>> I've never seen a single definition of the term. Conal Eliot's
>> "denotational programming" is too general to be definition. I want to
>> try Grapefruit, but I got totally lost when I see arrow notation.
>>
>> I consider more lightweight and more imperative approach, something
>> closer to CSP (Communicating Secuential Processes) then FRP. I've just
>> crafted some sample program to illustrate my idea.
>>
>> The behaviour is a monad and it's IO monad so you can do any IO
>> (Gtk2hs) programming you wish. The differences is that you don't
>> attach static event handlers and tries to determine what to do
>> dependent on application state. You attach and detach handlers as much
>> as possible. Behaviour looks like a process that can stop execution
>> and wait for some GUI event. When event arrived it continues
>> execution.
>
>        To summarize, the behaviour is a suspendable IO computation. It looks
> very much like a coroutine, in fact. I'm planning to extract the
> Control.Concurrent.Coroutine module [1] into a separate package soon. It
> implements a similar concept but generalized to transform any monad and any
> functorial suspension.
>
> [1]
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/scc/0.4/doc/html/Control-Concurrent-Coroutine.html
>
>

Yes, behaviour is exactly a coroutine. Your coroutine module seem
cool, but I would like to have a DSL closer to GUI programming than to
concurrent programming.

>> Do you see this approach viable. There are steel some details to emerge:
>> * How to wait for several events
>> * How to handle IO exceptions
>
>        I don't really know how applicable the idea is to GUI programming.
> That's not my area of expertise. I am surprised, though, that neither your
> code not your comments seem to address the issue of concurrency, as I expect
> that would be crucial in a GUI setting. Wouldn't you need different
> behaviours to run in different threads?
>

As I understand Gtk2hs still don't run in -threaded environment. And
I've been trying to avoid multithreading as much as possible. I've
already implemented exception handling through MonadError instance and
multi-event waits. Now I'm trying to rewrite GUI code of my
lambda-interpreter, and I'll publish it on hackage, when I am done.

>>
>> Here is the code:
>> {-# LANGUAGE ExistentialQuantification #-}
>> ...
>
>
>        I don't see the purpose of your BBind constructor. It seems to me
> that you could simply move the first three cases of runBehaviour
> implementation into your >>= and get rid of the constructor. Do you need
> that much laziness?
>

I think, I need it, I can't see the way to rewrite it without
intermediate data-structure. The problem is the third case:

runBehaviour (BBind (BBind a f) g) = runBehaviour (a >>= (\x -> f x >>= g))

See Heinrich Apfelmus' entry in Monad.Reader to see operational view
on monads. My implementation is very close to this idea.

-- 
Victor Nazarov