[ltk-user] First use of ltk

[Thomas F. Burdick]

2009/12/6 Peter Herth <herth at peter-herth.de>:
>
> On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 2:03 AM, Greg Bennett <gwbennett at sentex.ca> wrote:
>
>> My lisp experience is with Franz's Allegro and their common graphics.
>> There I can open a window and keep the listener/repl alive.
>>  From the repl
>> (setf w make-a-window-syntax)
>> then allows me to do things like
>> (draw-to w some-graphic)
>> from that REPL.
>> This facility is important to the application I'm interested in porting;
>> I guess it
>> means that I must learn how to program with threads/processes to obtain
>> this behaviour.
>
> First of all - you can interactively call start-wish to start a wish session and
> then use all LTk-functions from the repl (you will get events handles only
> if you call process-events or mainloop). However this is only for testing and
> interactive development.
>
> If you want to have a lisp repl within a LTk program, I would not recommend
> threads. Amongst all other possible problems, the LTk functionality should be
> used only from one thread. But fortunately, this is not necessary if you want
> for example just integrate a lisp listener into a LTk program. The
> easiest solution
> would be, to use a textfield for the repl interaction and trigger the
> Lisp evaluation
> from the corresponding Tk events - no threads needed. ABLE implements a
> small Lisp IDE completely in LTk.

I just have a few things to add to what Peter said:

* Regarding threads, Ltk is most certainly not reentrantly
thread-safe. It's in a situation like Apple's Cocoa is/was; you may
have multiple threads, but only one may control the GUI. Changing this
isn't especially a priority as in practice it's never been a problem.

* I agree that an Ltk-based REPL would be the right answer if it's to
be part of an application. But there is another, SBCL-specific way to
launch an Ltk program and keep the REPL responsive. You can tell Ltk
to integrate itself into the SBCL main event loop by doing (with-ltk
(:serve-event t) ...).

I added the serve-event backend precisely to be able to interact with
the running gui without having to call (mainloop) manually :-)

-Thomas