Greg Ewing wrote: >I'm not sure the event-loop situation would be >much different with another one, anyway. From what >I've seen of GUI toolkits, they all have their own >form of event loop, and they all provide some way >of hooking other things into it (as does Tkinter), >but whichever one you're using, it likes to be in >charge. > It's not because it likes to be in charge, it's because there's no other way to do it in Python. In our scientific visualization software, we also have our own event loop. I'd much rather let a Python event loop handle our messages. Not only would it save us time programming (setting up an event loop in an extension module that passes control back to Python when needed is tricky), it would also give better performance, it would work with IDLE (which an event loop in an extension module cannot as explained in my previous post), and it would let different extension modules live happily together all using the same event loop.
Tkinter is a special case among GUI toolkits because it is married to Tcl. It doesn't just need to handle its GUI events, it also needs to run the Tcl interpreter in between. Which is why Tkinter needs to be in charge of the event loop. For other GUI toolkits, I don't see a reason why they'd need their own event loop. > Code which blocks reading from standard >input doesn't fit very well into any of them. > > Actually, this is not difficult to accomplish. For example, try Tcl's wish on Linux: It will pop up a (responsive) graphics window but continue to read Tcl commands from the terminal. This is done via a call to select (on Unix) or MsgWaitForMultipleObjects (on Windows). Both of these can listen for terminal input and GUI events at the same time. --Michiel. -- Michiel de Hoon Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Columbia University 1150 St Nicholas Avenue New York, NY 10032 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
