Towards a native windows GUI

[David Hopwood]

Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB) wrote:
[...]
>       The really interesting observation is that the underlying windows GUI architecture is
> a pure message passing system - (Like X) - which should mean that it will interface
> well with the Erlang process model (like the X11 ex11 code did).

Win32 GDI is in no sense a pure message passing architecture. Yes, the
communication between windows is message passing, but to do anything useful
there are thousands of procedures that operate on particular kinds of handle
or device context.

All the messages *are* documented, BTW. However, they're scattered all over the
docs, and the MSVC++ search facilities leave a little to be desired. You need to
search *in titles only* for the various message type prefixes (e.g. "WM_*" for
window messages). Also read 'User Interface Design and Development / Windows 
Management / Windows User Interface / Windowing / Messages and Message Queues'
in the contents. And browsing 'Graphics and Multimedia / Windows GDI / SDK
Documentation' may give you more of an idea how much of the API is procedural.

[A tip on using the MSVC++ help: the 'Sync Contents' button (left-right arrow)
that syncs the 'contents' tree with the current page is very useful.]

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED>