[Haskell'23] The Essence of Reactivity

The Essence of Reactivity (Video, Haskell 2023)
Ivan Perez and Frank Dedden
(KBR @ NASA Ames Research Center, USA; System F Computing, Netherlands)
Abstract: Reactive programming, functional reactive programming, event-based programming, stream programming, and temporal logic all share an underlying commonality: values can vary over time. These languages differ in multiple ways, including the nature of time itself (e.g., continuous or discrete, dense or sparse, implicit or explicit), on how much of the past and future can be referenced, on the kinds of values that can be represented, as well as the mechanisms used to evaluate expressions or formulas. This paper presents a series of abstractions that capture the essence of different forms of time variance. By separating the aspects that differentiate each family of formalisms, we can better express the commonalities and differences between them. We demonstrate our work with a prototype in Haskell that allows us to write programs in terms of a generic interface that can be later instantiated to different abstractions depending on the desired target.
Article: doi.org/10.1145/3609026.3609727
ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9998-0269, orcid.org/0009-0000-9311-5787
Video Tags: abstraction, stream programming, time variance, temporal logic, functional reactive programming, compilation, domain-specific languages, icfpws23haskellmain-id29-p, doi:10.1145/3609026.3609727, orcid:0000-0002-9998-0269, orcid:0009-0000-9311-5787
Presentation at the Haskell 2023 conference, September 8-9, 2023, icfp23.sigplan.org/home/haske...
Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN, www.sigplan.org/