GUI Library Task Force

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

|  *** The GUI Library Task Force Strategy Proposal ***

Great! =20

| * Start from the API of GTK+ as a base line:

That's fine by me.  But can I suggest that the task force be sure
to read the details of the Clean GUI library design.   Peter Aachten
(while visiting Cambridge) rendered a good chunk of it into Haskell,
using MVars exactly as you describe.   (The type structure became
a good deal simpler than the Clean library when using MVars instead=20
of state-passing.)

The reason I think its worth a careful look is that the Clean folk have
developed their library interface over a long period, and have a lot
of experience in its use.  It is not specific to any one platform or
toolkit, nor does it attempt to implement everything, so its general
goals fit with the ones you describe.  I wondered whether its design
would not "fit" Haskell because of the different approaches to I/O,
but that turned out not to be an issue.

There's a paper that introduces the Haskell rendering of the
Clean library at
=09
http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/haskellobjectio.htm

Simon