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Great to see things are coming along with LightTable. I was a bit surprised by this: > Lots of things that were blocking the UI no longer are thanks to some ma

by vosper 13y ago

Great to see things are coming along with LightTable. I was a bit surprised by this: > Lots of things that were blocking the UI no longer are thanks to some magical hackery (given the lack of threads in JS) I thought WebWorkers where designed to alleviate these kinds of issues. It seems like Webkit supports WebWorkers so I'm surprised they weren't used - anyone know the rationale?

ibdknox 13y ago
I can't do any kind of IO in a webworker, which means things like indexing the filesystem are impossible there. The vast majority of cases where I need to do background work I also need access to the host. EDIT: I should note that I did start with webworkers for things like auto-complete, but what I'm doing now (spinning up another instance of node) is a lot more powerful and robust. As scary and sad as that may be.
- airlocksoftware 13y ago
  Kinda tangential, but mentioning threads brought it up. I have core.async on the brain, so I was just wondering if you've looked at it or plan on using it for anything. David Nolen had a cool example using it for event handling.
  - ibdknox 13y ago
    There are places where it'd be useful, no doubt about that. Mainly it will be really useful in the cases where you want to ask a client something "synchronously". For example it'll make doing things like asking a language client where function boundaries are much nicer than the way I was going to have to do it before (waiting for events to be triggered async-style).
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Why to use node instead of Clojure then? This seems just like hacking around a non-existing problem if JS wasn't being used.
  - ibdknox 13y ago
    because I wanted to use html/css as the UI toolkit and utilizing JS gives me a bunch of stuff for "free." I looked into using javafx and various other java-y things that embed webkit but they are painfully slow, to the point where it wasn't practical to even try using them.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Given the work you have to do now, it wasn't for "free".
      - ibdknox 13y ago
        I tried the alternatives and they were fundamentally unworkable. The cost here wasn't that great, mostly it was a matter of figuring out the least bad solution to the problem. Compared to the issues I ran into with java-based integrations, this really was of negligible cost.
        pjmlp 13y ago
        Personally I would have used Swing and avoid any integration issues, but it is not my product. Good luck with Lighttable, all the luck to make it successful.
    - vosper 13y ago
      That makes sense - if I was building any kind of UI these days it'd take a very strong argument to convince me not to build it with HTML/CSS. Working around some JS issues seems like a relatively small price to pay.
    - city41 13y ago
      Would you be able to quickly explain LT's architecture from a mile above? node-webkit for an HTML based UI. How does clojure come into it? Or is clojurescript the workhorse?
      - 13y ago

by vosper 13y ago

ibdknox 13y ago

I can't do any kind of IO in a webworker, which means things like indexing the filesystem are impossible there. The vast majority of cases where I need to do background work I also need access to the host. EDIT: I should note that I did start with webworkers for things like auto-complete, but what I'm doing now (spinning up another instance of node) is a lot more powerful and robust. As scary and sad as that may be.

airlocksoftware 13y ago
Kinda tangential, but mentioning threads brought it up. I have core.async on the brain, so I was just wondering if you've looked at it or plan on using it for anything. David Nolen had a cool example using it for event handling.
- ibdknox 13y ago
  There are places where it'd be useful, no doubt about that. Mainly it will be really useful in the cases where you want to ask a client something "synchronously". For example it'll make doing things like asking a language client where function boundaries are much nicer than the way I was going to have to do it before (waiting for events to be triggered async-style).
pjmlp 13y ago
Why to use node instead of Clojure then? This seems just like hacking around a non-existing problem if JS wasn't being used.
- ibdknox 13y ago
  because I wanted to use html/css as the UI toolkit and utilizing JS gives me a bunch of stuff for "free." I looked into using javafx and various other java-y things that embed webkit but they are painfully slow, to the point where it wasn't practical to even try using them.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Given the work you have to do now, it wasn't for "free".
    - ibdknox 13y ago
      I tried the alternatives and they were fundamentally unworkable. The cost here wasn't that great, mostly it was a matter of figuring out the least bad solution to the problem. Compared to the issues I ran into with java-based integrations, this really was of negligible cost.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        Personally I would have used Swing and avoid any integration issues, but it is not my product. Good luck with Lighttable, all the luck to make it successful.
  - vosper 13y ago
    That makes sense - if I was building any kind of UI these days it'd take a very strong argument to convince me not to build it with HTML/CSS. Working around some JS issues seems like a relatively small price to pay.
  - city41 13y ago
    Would you be able to quickly explain LT's architecture from a mile above? node-webkit for an HTML based UI. How does clojure come into it? Or is clojurescript the workhorse?
    - 13y ago