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I always dreamt of a GUI library where every widget would be a separate actor sending and receiving messages.
by qwerty456127 4y ago
I always dreamt of a GUI library where every widget would be a separate actor sending and receiving messages.
- zarzavat 4y agoThis is basically how Objective-C worked, being based on Smalltalk. Especially with NSNotificationCenter, you also get the async aspect (so-called “NSNotificationCenter spaghetti code”). Personally I have mixed feelings on it. ObjC/AppKit was clearly a step up from classic object UI toolkits built in rigid languages like C++, but I find React and its immediate-mode brethren far more enjoyable to work with precisely because there is no amorphous graph of actors sending messages to each other.
- qwerty456127 4y agoI see. Isn't it (non-blocking message-exchanging objects) the most natural way to reason about though? Surely classic types and sequential function execution is more convenient for data processing/scripting but a GUI seems a naturally object-oriented thing and it feels better when the objects act independently.