gui-thunks VS signal

It's interesting how every build system, frontend framework, programming language implements its own promise pipeline/delayed execution/observables/event propagation.

But the implementations are rarely extracted out for general purpose usage and rarely have a rich API.

I've been thinking a lot about a general purpose "epoll" which be registered on objects that change. I want to be able to register a reaction to a sequence of actions on arbitrary objects with an epoll style API.

One of my ideas is GUI thunking. The idea that every interaction with the GUI raises a new type that can be interacted with, to queue up behaviours on the GUI. This is essentially Future<> that are typed and the system reacts to the new type based on what you did.

It's a bit like terraform plan and apply, but applied to general purpose GUIs.

For example, you can click download file, then queue up installation and then using the application, ALL BEFORE it is installed. Because the actual computation is separate from the type information that was queued up.

Imagine using AWS Console to set up an entire infrastructure and wire everything together but not actually execute anything until the very end when you click "Run".

https://github.com/samsquire/gui-thunks

I spend everyday thinking of what my computer could be doing.

Most of the time the CPU is waiting for IO - memory, network, SSD, disk and not doing any work.

You might like my idea called GUI Thunking.

https://github.com/samsquire/gui-thunks

"Signal" has been used in FRP circles for some time [1,2]. The original FRP stuff was events/signals and behaviours. But I agree that JS didn't use this terminology until more recently. S.js is maybe one of the earlier ones, but that was still over 8 years ago.

[1] https://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=651...

[2] https://github.com/14427/signal

[3] https://github.com/adamhaile/S/tree/e897ec1212a073bb1fe695e1...