Ringbuffers ?

[3Jane]

Hello,

i've found anic, while trying to get an overview of all existing
languages searching one to write a GUI-Builder. For those
dynamism and threading is essential for me: Essential,
where i want to improve them.

1. It is ridiculous, that a print preview is modal. It is ridiculous,
that scrollbars, tab headers and similar navigation elements
are not usable always, should there run a callback or not.

2. The execution order in a GUI-program could be compared
with a torus, the main-Event-loop the main circle, the callbacks
the smaller ones. The structure of our programs is reflecting
this torus in no way at all. Especially the exits from the
main loops are everywhere, sometimes deeply hidden in
the code.

3. "Clicked" is a fairly complex event, built from other.
The GUI-builder should provide tools to synthesize
Events much more easy. In a language with functions
this needs at least higher-order and assignable
functions. I'd like to make matching a regular expression
in text widgets to Events, among others.

I've begun to create an own language too, Brace. And
one of the sequence types supported by the syntax
will be ringbuffers, for entries with heterogenous types
(of course). These have a fixed "readius", fixed at
creation, and push() and pop() both using a pointer.
And when the write-pointer is reaching the read-pointer
writing blocks (causing the writer to wait til some more
entries are read), when the read-pointer reaches the
write-pointer, reading blocks.

That means, that when they are equal, one of them
is "covered" and only the other usable.

With radius 1 this were just a latch. With larger
radiusses it can provide a
flexible coupling of execution in different
threads. With really large radiusses they could
used like streams with the advantage, that
memory need is strictly limited and never
growing. And their behavior with the
write-pointer could be changed allowing
overwriting of "expired" (never read) entries.

Thought at something like this ? For radius 1
the read- and write-pointers would be huge
overhead in comparation to latches - but
that could resolved internally. And radius
could have the default value 1.

The focus of Brace related to threading will be
providing easy creation and control of threads.
Thus it is heading towards quite a different
direction than anic. Still i'd could share some
work on standard methods, utf-related for
example with anic.

Good luck, Joost