On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 07:41:58AM -0400, Jon Hylands wrote:
> Well, not to throw water on the fire or anything, but Morphic implements a
> polling mechanism that updates the GUIs on the screen every so often. This
> polling mechanism runs in a background thread, and is responsible for that
> behavior.

It seems to me that #step implements a poor man's lightweight process.
Is there any reason for not actually using separate lightweight processes?
For a well-implemented LWP library, the overhead per thread should
only be a few words.

There have been a few GUIs built around the idea of using lots of
lightweight processes, active objects, or actors.  (Incidentally, the best
way for them to communicate seems to be via mailboxes asynchronous method
calls, message passing, or pipes, not by calling each other's methods.)
Such GUIs tend to be responsive and easier to program in my experience.

Thomas.