Efficient Purely Functional Reactivity is a really interesting paper relating to reactive programming. The paper has some pretty advanced concepts from Haskell but at the very least it will show you that there's a lot of research that we could use to support MT work (specifically, API design).
Functional reactive programming (FRP) supports elegant programming of dynamic and reactive systems by providing first-class, composable abstractions for behaviors (time-varying values) and events (streams of timed values) (Elliott and Hudak 1997; Nilsson et al. 2002).1 Behaviors can change continuously (not just frequently), with discretization introduced automatically during rendering. The choice of continuous time makes programs simpler and more composable than the customary (for computer programming) choice of discrete time, just as is the case with continuous space for modeled imagery. For instance, vector and 3D graphics representations are inherently scalable (resolution-independent), as compared to bitmaps (which are spatially discrete). Similarly, temporally or spatially infinite representations are more composable than their finite counterparts, because they can be scaled arbitrarily in time or space, before being clipped to a finite time/space window. While FRP has simple, pure, and composable semantics, its efficient implementation has not been so simple. In particular, past implementations have used demand-driven (pull) sampling of reactive behaviors, in contrast to the data-driven (push) evaluation typically used for reactive systems, such as GUIs. There are at least two strong reasons for choosing pull over push for FRP. http://conal.net/papers/simply-reactive/reactive.pdf David
_______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~multi-touch-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~multi-touch-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
