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[!Liquid] any questions about liquid dataflow core.

Pekr
19-May-2007
[459]
Gabriele - is there new event system in View? IIRC we were thinking 
along the lines of plugging some external library into rebol - libevent, 
liboop, etc.
Volker
19-May-2007
[460x2]
It works for the gui. I dont step into theory about slow, if i have 
a real life example which is fast :) about everything to everything, 
that would be in a bad case: each event to 100 receivers, 100 events/sec, 
10k dispatches/sec. cpu can do 1 billion instructions. 10k instructions/event. 
most of them: i am interested? no. ~100.
100k instruction/event.
Gabriele
19-May-2007
[462x2]
petr, yes and no. yes in the sense that events come from devices, 
no in the sense you mean (libevent). i don't see why we would need 
libevent or anything like that.
volker... oberon may be doing tricks, such as not really broadcasting 
to everything... so the fact that it is fast does not make the approach 
a good approach.
BrianH
19-May-2007
[464x3]
No multithreading on Oberon (back in the day - Active Oberon has 
it now). They managed multitasking through shared memory structures 
and other interesting tricks.
Because of this it was able to manage a full GUI and still be as 
fast as DOS.
Single process, no virtual memory - through other tricks, they managed 
to avoid needing it. Because of this the event broadcast, like everything 
else it did, ran by itself on the bare metal. Hence the speed.
Maxim
22-May-2007
[467x8]
Gabriele, liquid (dataflow) adds a level of stability to any project. 
 the fact that its lazy pays off very well so far.
the system in its current form is not meant to be easy to code  (for 
maintenance reasons).  I know many ways to change this, but before 
going to far, I had to have as stable an architecture as possible.
I have gone through 3 rewrites before hitting this sweetspot.  other 
versions might have been simpler in a way, but left the system, non 
generic and unscalable in one of many different ways.
liquid's strength lies in the fact that it is generic.  we all write 
dataflow within our applications, without realising it.  but we then 
recode each little system in its own isolated architecture.  this 
means we just loose a lot of time.
I was able to write elixir in about 40-50 hours of time and the only 
bugs it has are within the parts of code which has no dataflow.  
everytime I trust liquid and switch part of the code to it, I end 
up forgetting about that part, because it gets to be so stable.
I am as anxious as all of you and understand ALL of your qualms about 
using dataflow and liquid. 
 *complexity?
 *speed?
 *scalability?
 *difference in programming model
 * ....
The truth is, I do not have the reflex of using liquid for most of 
my coding, still, but actuall exposure and use, is forcing me to 
value its effect on my code.  this is empiric use, not advocacy. 
 If you could see just how easy it was for me to build fully bug-free 
AGG gadgets in so little time, you'd understand.


its not about just sharing data between gadgets, its about allowing 
your code to know what's going on.
and in fact, if we do add a measure of reflexivity to VID, we will 
just be redoing most of liquid, or run in the same issues, I had 
in my other prototypes, which led to this design.   ;-)

but we will not gain the advantage of having generic dataflow!
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[475]
max: liquidgl is push based, isn't it? so "lazy" does not count.
Maxim
22-May-2007
[476x2]
nope, its all using the same core plug.  so its really pull based.
the only difference is that some (switcheable in real time, even 
set to a function) which will always want to refresh, when they are 
aware of data changes.
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[478]
when you move a slider that is attached to something, is that something 
that has to pull? does it pull x times a second?
Maxim
22-May-2007
[479]
its also nice to know that your GUI is actually capable of reflecting 
data.  not just gui.  change the data:

fill data value


and don't even have to wonder IF and HOW any gadget should change.
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[480]
that is push, isn't it?
Maxim
22-May-2007
[481]
 does it pull x times a second?

that is up to you to decide, really.
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[482]
my decision is not to pull at all, if something changes the change 
is pushed to everything that needs to know.
Maxim
22-May-2007
[483x4]
at a high level yes.  but in reality, no.  if you have some gadgets 
or other parts of dependent systems which do not "need" the value, 
it might not cause any refresh.
that doesn't scale well.
(tested)
that really is just like an action.
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[487]
exactly, just an action, or to say it differently, just an event.
Maxim
22-May-2007
[488x2]
but you are only seeing all of this as a VID thing.
dataflow has nothing to do with GUI.
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[490]
we only need it for the gui - that's exactly my point
Maxim
22-May-2007
[491x2]
its something the whole language should have.
nope.
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[493]
noone stops people from including liquid
Maxim
22-May-2007
[494x3]
cause you do not see its value if it where built in.
;-)
especially since its such a small kernel !  (not the current implementation, 
which has a few prototypical stuff left)
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[497]
liquid is small, but the functionality we needs comes free with my 
vid design, so you can't win ;)
Maxim
22-May-2007
[498x3]
you see, if we had a dataflow datatype, we would not even need to 
talk about "do we add this to VID"  people could just set values 
to attributes which are DF based.
but I know your POV.  but you don't see how limited that becomes. 
 we could have what you propose and ALSO have full DF.
it wont remove what you propose... and in fact its not even more 
complex in use.
Gabriele
22-May-2007
[501x3]
full df, sure, but no reason to have it builtin.
if we had to put everything that is cool built in, rebol would be 
10mb like many other languages.
eg, should pdf maker be built in? of course not!
Maxim
22-May-2007
[504]
hum liquid is what 50 kb of 0% optimised code.  DF its a data processing 
kernel, paradigm level feature.. quite different in scope.
Dockimbel
24-May-2007
[505]
Hi Max, reading the %liquid.r source code from rebol.org, I've found 
a typo at line 948 : count plug/subordnates object!  (i missing in 
"subordnates").
DideC
24-May-2007
[506]
Hi Max,

Do you have any demo apps using liquid ? Something simple, but usefull 
to help me (and others) understand how and when to use it.
Maxim
24-May-2007
[507x2]
Hi doc, The version of liquid on line is not quite the latest (obviously)... 
 but I'll check out your info... its possible that one was already 
fixed.... I fixed a few minor bugs  since I last released.  Mainly 
due to intense use within glob and elixir.
dideC: well, I'm am working towards that.  I am keeping up the habit 
of working on one thing at a time and currently I'm hard at work 
on Revault.  that being said... guess what are the first libs to 
be put online  ;-)