On Saturday 21 April 2001 07:33, Tom wrote:

> 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.

Why wouldn't the existing Process class work for this? It's already pretty 
lightweight, and you don't have to write anything new...

> 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.

You can have it both ways: although right now Morphic runs in one thread, you 
can use a SharedQueue to send evaluable things (BlockContexts, MessageSends, 
etc.) to the Morphic event loop for evaluation in that process.

See addDeferredUIMessage: for details

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com