Declarative and Minimalistic Computing
Functional reactive programming with propagators
<p>Functional reactive programming (FRP) is a declarative programming paradigm that is most commonly used in interactive applications where imperative, event-driven, callback-laden code quickly becomes overwhelming and difficult to reason about. The reduction in cognitive overhead comes at a price, however. Popular reactive systems are limited to one-way data flow (a directed acyclic graph) which limits the types of problems these systems can solve elegantly. Fortunately, a way to remove this limitation has been known for over 15 years! Alexey Radul's 2009 PhD thesis "Propagation Networks: A Flexible and Expressive Substrate for Computation" tells us how. In this talk, I'll use Guile Scheme to demonstrate how an FRP system built on the propagator model allows for cyclic dependencies without user-visible glitches whilst keeping implementation complexity low.</p>
Additional information
| Live Stream | https://live.fosdem.org/watch/ub4136 |
|---|---|
| Type | devroom |
| Language | English |
More sessions
| 2/1/26 |
<p>Crystal focuses on developer happiness while still providing strong safety guarantees. It goes to great lengths to make complex concepts easy to use, taking away a lot of complexity. For example, static typing and compilation to native code make it intrinsically type safe and blazingly fast. Yet built-in type inference makes most type annotations unnecessary, resulting in easy to read and clean code. It feels like a dynamic language. Crystal’s runtime allows the programmer to write I/O ...
|
| 2/1/26 |
<p>Terminal UI libraries often rely on heavy dependencies (e.g., curses) or platform-specific hacks. Lua’s minimal standard library makes this even harder—how can we provide a portable, lightweight solution? In this talk we’ll explore terminal.lua (built on top of luasystem): a minimal, cross-platform terminal UI library for Lua designed to provide essential terminal primitives without external dependencies like curses. The work presented here includes developments made during its ...
|
| 2/1/26 |
<p><strong>BLUE</strong> is an acronym for <strong>Build Language User Extensible</strong>. It is a functional declarative build-system fully written in Guile.</p> <p>As opposed to other build-systems, BLUE works as a library that can be used by projects to manage their builds. It is entirely self-contained and <em>can</em> be embedded into existing projects. It provides an optional clean and extensible CLI and extension points for external tools.</p> <p>BLUE aims to reduce frictions from the ...
|
| 2/1/26 |
<p>Ever wondered what is so special about Lisp's REPLs? Curious how to debug your Guile project or write tests? Lost in all the tools and libraries and not sure which to use or how? We've got you covered.</p> <p>Today we will go through the fundamental tools needed for efficient Guile development. This will work for your personal Guix config, Guix itself, a new fancy Guile library, or Your Next Big Thing. We will go step by step from a simple project stub to a fully functional application ...
|
| 2/1/26 |
<p>Those looking to get started with Scheme often find that they need to first learn Emacs. This is for good reason: pretty much all other editors have lacked the basic features to make Scheme a comfortable language to use. Over the past year, I've been developing my own VS Code extension to make programming Scheme without Emacs a reality. This talk explores what exists today, covering both my own extension, other tooling, and what's left for us to do as a community to make Scheme a first-class ...
|
| 2/1/26 |
<p><a href="https://codeberg.org/andywingo/wastrel">Wastrel</a> is a new ahead-of-time compiler from WebAssembly to native binaries. It has all the features, tail calls, garbage collection (via <a href="https://github.com/wingo/whippet">Whippet</a>), and exception handling included. In this talk we show how Wastrel can run on vanilla C programs compiled using the <a href="https://wasi.dev/">WASI</a> toolchain with best-in-class performance, as well as running Scheme programs compiled using <a ...
|
| 2/1/26 |
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)">Lisp</a> is often decried for being hard to read and having too little syntax. This talk argues that the parentheses are not the point, but the uniform structure is! Lisp is like clay: a medium which is versatile for building many shapes and sculpting beautiful new technical visions. Christine Lemmer-Webber makes an argument that lisp's power comes from composable DSLs, and that this power is what gives projects like <a ...
|
