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Since a few months I’ve been learning Erlang, and now it was time to do some basic GUI.
After some quick research I saw there was an interesting library called ‘wxi’ (based on Fudgets of Haskell) which uses a different approach on GUI’s. No central loop, every widget processes it’s own events and handles it’s own data.
What do you guys think about this? It looks like it kind of can be efficient in languages such as Erlang, and it’s an interesting approach.
William van Doorn
In conventional apps, a process (or thread, if you want to be picky) owns the state of the UI and handles events via a message loop. Since Erlang processes are extremely lightweight, wxi’s approach is a very logical and natural extension of the conventional model.
This approach has signification ramifications for UI and app design. For instance, a complex download-manager control that has animation, I/O, etc., can be bundled as a completely independent process (with sub-processes handling its component UI pieces) that interacts with the parent UI through message-passing. Such a control could even crash due to a connection problem or internal bug, and the parent control, acting as a supervisor, would indicate that an error occurred and simply start a new copy of the control.