Lazy Marking: A Lazier Implementation of Functional I/O for Graphical User Interfaces
Margaret Burnett, J. William Atwood · 1994
Today''s programming applications increasingly include interactive graphical user interfaces (GUIs). These interfaces by their very nature contain a that must be continuously maintained. However, in some cases, maintaining this display state in a lazy functional language involves such eager performance of housekeeping tasks in the runtime system that the quick response needed for a GUI cannot be attained. We introduce a new strategy called lazy marking that eliminates this eagerness, and characterize the situations in which it outperforms more eager approaches. While lazy marking sometimes improves overall performance, more importantly, it significantly improves response time in lazy functional languages supporting GUIs.