3 ms·

Ah, it's good to know we have an ally against a common foe and I respect that you're taking a different approach (I suspect you'd be interested in Mezzo). I'd r

Ah, it's good to know we have an ally against a common foe and I respect that you're taking a different approach (I suspect you'd be interested in Mezzo). I'd really encourage you to try out React though. It's different than other FRP type systems because the granularity of "reactivity" is much larger (at the component level) which means the majority of your code executes on plain data structures such as arrays and objects. There's no need to continuously be lifting your data into some "reactive" data container. For example, if you have two numbers that are changing over time, if you want to add them, you use the + operator instead of creating some kind of "ReactivePlus" operator. Also, in some types of apps, when you have many of these point to point bindings wired up, the bookkeeping of them can start to add up too, especially when everything ends up changing any time anything small changes. This hurts two cases predominantly: 1. Your initial rendering of the UI. You usually have to set up these point to point bindings. It would be faster to not have to when blocking the initial user experience (which is critical). 2. When small changes end up rerendering the entire page anyways. This is the worst time to be slow because you already have so much to do! If some small imperceivable delay becomes a medium imperceivable delay, it's not so bad. But when the entire scene changes all the time, a framework like React that anticipates this can cut right to the chase and do the rerendering without also having to do the bookkeeping along the way. Different apps will have different sweet spots in different paradigms. I will say that it's worked out well for us at Facebook/Instagram and many other serious production apps (not just simple examples). I'd encourage you to try it out and give us more feedback since you've done so much research in this area.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
When I was working in a design studio, I wrote a framework called Bling that auto lifts WPF dependency property animation/data binding for C#: http://bling.codeplex.com/ http://bling.codeplex.com/ So you could write something like: w.Right.Bind = v.Left + k.Width and it would compile that into a continuous data binding expression (auto lifting was also useful for defining shaders in C#, they use similar techniques in JS/WebGL). But you are absolutely right: the book keeping was too much, and if you had say a chart with 100x100 cells each individually bound, your startup time would really suck. Glitch (my current work) has a much lower cost per state read (where you install listeners), and, like React, does not require lifted operations: so you read some state into values, operate on some values, and store the values in some state somewhere else. Each read is traced as it happens, each write is logged as it occurs, everything in between is just normal code; no lifting is necessary (I think React is like that for reads and doesn't allow for state writes outside of DOM updates that appear immutable). The only question now is about granularity, and that is completely tweakable. There are some issues with state cycles, which have to be rejected (otherwise, non-monotonic changes might not work correctly in an incremental context), and keeping state separate helps prevent "false" cycles from occurring, but I'm looking at ways to separate cycle detection with state update granularity, and anyways, none of that applies to React since writes aren't handled in the framework. What I'm interested in is expressiveness; as a PL person I have a cliche benchmark: can you implement a compiler in React? A compiler, after all, is just a "view" of flat text into some other form (e.g. a typed AST that can be used as a model in a language-aware editor). For React, I think the symbol table would stop you (everything else in a compiler is pretty much functional), but I might be wrong. I'm definitely interested in React and will keep looking at it. Unfortunately, I don't do any web work so finding a proper context is hard.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

When I was working in a design studio, I wrote a framework called Bling that auto lifts WPF dependency property animation/data binding for C#: http://bling.codeplex.com/ http://bling.codeplex.com/ So you could write something like: w.Right.Bind = v.Left + k.Width and it would compile that into a continuous data binding expression (auto lifting was also useful for defining shaders in C#, they use similar techniques in JS/WebGL). But you are absolutely right: the book keeping was too much, and if you had say a chart with 100x100 cells each individually bound, your startup time would really suck. Glitch (my current work) has a much lower cost per state read (where you install listeners), and, like React, does not require lifted operations: so you read some state into values, operate on some values, and store the values in some state somewhere else. Each read is traced as it happens, each write is logged as it occurs, everything in between is just normal code; no lifting is necessary (I think React is like that for reads and doesn't allow for state writes outside of DOM updates that appear immutable). The only question now is about granularity, and that is completely tweakable. There are some issues with state cycles, which have to be rejected (otherwise, non-monotonic changes might not work correctly in an incremental context), and keeping state separate helps prevent "false" cycles from occurring, but I'm looking at ways to separate cycle detection with state update granularity, and anyways, none of that applies to React since writes aren't handled in the framework. What I'm interested in is expressiveness; as a PL person I have a cliche benchmark: can you implement a compiler in React? A compiler, after all, is just a "view" of flat text into some other form (e.g. a typed AST that can be used as a model in a language-aware editor). For React, I think the symbol table would stop you (everything else in a compiler is pretty much functional), but I might be wrong. I'm definitely interested in React and will keep looking at it. Unfortunately, I don't do any web work so finding a proper context is hard.