Re: [Chicken-users] Chicken and GUI programming

[Felix]

From: Michele La Monaca <address@hidden>
Subject: [Chicken-users] Chicken and GUI programming
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 19:19:57 +0200

> Hi,
> 
> I am investigating the feasibility and the opportunity to write
> (basic) Win32 GUI apps using Chicken. So far I think I've obtained
> good results leveraging Christian Kellermann's nice technique to
> handle callbacks
> (http://pestilenz.org/~ckeen/blog/posts/callbacks.html)*.  I am able
> to create windows, add widgets, react to events and so on.
> Unfortunately I've stumbled upon a problem I am not able to overcome.
> When the app engages in long running operations, the (scheme)
> procedure in charge of handling GUI's events starves, with the net
> effect that the app seems to freeze.

Does it freeze while the long-running operation is in progress,
or does it freeze indefinitely?

> 
> So my question is: it's just me not properly using Chicken's
> "cooperative" threads (which might be well the case since I am not
> accustomed to those), or I've hit an intrinsic limit of Chicken being
> single threaded (in the pthread sense of "concurrent" threads)?

The threads CHICKEN uses are not compatible with native threads.
The CHICKEN-runtime is definitely single threaded. For UNIXish
systems + pthreads there is an egg that does what Christian
describes, but including full thread-synchronization:

http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/concurrent-native-callbacks


cheers,
felix