[Fluxus] qt port / source code management

[Matt Jadud]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 8:02 AM, Dave Griffiths <dave at pawfal.org> wrote:
>> 1. Every time I used mred or drscheme i quickly ran into garbage
>> collection taking like 5 seconds to finish. I thought if I constantly

I think you should provide a concrete example back to the PLT group
about this. It is possible that you are doing something inefficient,
or there is something in their codebase that they can improve with
your code as an example.

Either way, it sounds strange.

> I see what you are thinking about though, and I do like it. I'm all for
> I think if I were to do this (not using fluxus itself) I'd do it by using
> a PLT extension to a gui toolkit (maybe not MrEd) and writing the
> application in scheme. This means it's completely separate from the

I believe the following is accurate, having followed the PLT list for
a number of years. Please keep in mind that I might be off in some of
the details, but I believe the gist of this is accurate:

PLT Scheme is complex. Any GUI toolkit that is connected deeply with
PLT Scheme will need to integrate into the garbage collector, etc.,
which is why the Wx backend of MrEd changes slowly. It takes tight
integration between the GUI layer and the runtime for this to work
well. Mind, I'm talking about the integration that yielded MrEd.

That said, just using the FFI to connect to another toolkit (and then
writing a large amount of Scheme code that looks just like C/C++)
should work just fine. I thought there were some fairly mature GTK(+,
or 2, or ?) bindings around at one point.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/pipermail/plt-scheme/2005-February/007893.html

(I found that on a quick Google search; you might be able to do better.)

> new dependancies (eg Qt). There is also the possibility that if it was
> done in a more general way it could be used for other things too.

I think that's the right way to think. The decoupling will probably
enable more cool ideas in the future, if there is a good separation of
concerns.

Cheers,
Matt