[plt-scheme] Planned changes for PLT Scheme 4.0

On Nov 17, 2007 10:11 PM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> At Sun, 18 Nov 2007 01:30:25 +0100 (CET), Ivanyi Peter wrote:
> > Would you (PLT-Scheme developers) consider updating the GUI part of
> > PLT-Scheme with a newer wxWindows? Can we discuss it?
>
> The problem is that "PLT Scheme developers" for this facet is just
> "Matthew". I'm burnt out on this topic, and no one else has stepped up
> to the task, so far.
>
> Surely implementing MrEd is a lot easier than it was 10 years ago.
> Those were the Motif days! Some people still used monochrome monitors.
> We had no Gtk or Cairo, and wxWindows crashed if you sneezed too hard.
> Someone ought to be able to show me how it's done these days, and put
> MrEd out of business.

It seems like implementing MrEd in terms of a modern toolkit involves
roughly two jobs:

1. Porting all the MrEd interfaces to the new toolkit API (this would
be *a lot* of grunt work, plus the effort in porting complex things
like editors).

2. Figuring out how to use abstractions like eventspaces and
custodians across the FFI boundary.  This seems like it could be
interesting, and maybe even research.  And it probably doesn't require
doing all the work of (1) first.

-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu