[m-dev.] Mercury UI framework proposal

[Ian MacLarty]

On 27 Jan 2006, at 03:08, Ralph Becket wrote:

> Ian MacLarty, Monday, 23 January 2006:
>> I've managed to implement the UI framework Julien and I were designing
>> without constructor classes.
>
> As a proof-of-concept sketch, I rather like it.
>
> I have some ideas about efficiency if this approach is going to fly
> (e.g., the GC burden would be huge if a complex interactive GUI had to
> be recomputed on every mouse event), but we should probably discuss
> these in the office.
>

My intuition is that this won't be a problem, because UIs normally work 
in a "do some work, wait for an event, do some work, wait for an event, 
etc" manner.  We could force a garbage collection during the "wait for 
an event" periods.  Anyway we can discuss this further when I return.

I think there are also some issues to explore with regard to how we 
render native GUIs (e.g. gtk).  Do we redraw the whole GUI each time, 
or just compute the difference between the old and new gui and redraw 
the bits that have changed.  I think we'll need to adopt the second 
approach, if not for performance, then to avoid flickering or other 
strange artifacts of redrawing the whole GUI (such as maybe windows 
jumping around).

I'm heading off to Belgium again this Sunday to sort out some issues to 
do with the project I'm working on and also because the Australian visa 
is taking longer than expected.  I should hopefully be back mid to late 
February.

Ian.

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