Can GUI Programming Be Liberated From the IO Monad

GUI programming in Haskell has developed along two lines: a purely functional one that includes Fudgets, FranTk, and, most recently, Fruit while a more conventional field of research has let to wxHaskell, a powerful portable GUI library in the imperative, object oriented style. This research began with a project to combine Fruit with wx-Haskell. While this effort demonstrated that it was possible to place a functional veneer over a portion of wxHaskell, it also revealed a large semantic gap between the purely functional GUI approach and the semantics of wxHaskell. This gap is apparent in the difficulty of bringing the full functionality of wxHaskell into the purely functional setting.