FRP - Release of reactive-banana version 0.8

I am very pleased to announce the release of version 0.8.0.0 of my reactive-banana library on hackage. The major additions are a push-driven implementation that actually performs like one and a new module Reactive.Banana.Prim which can be used to implement your own, custom FRP library.

After a long wait, I have finally found the time to implement a push-driven algorithm that actually deserves that name – the previous implementations had taken a couple of shortcuts that rendered the performance closer to that of a pull-driven implementation. There was also an unexpected space leak, which I have fixed using a reasoning principle I’d like to call space invariants. Note that this release doesn’t include garbage collection for dynamically switched events just yet. But having rewritten the core algorithm over and over again for several years now, I finally understand its structure so well that garbage collection is easy to add – in fact, I have already implemented it in the development branch for the future 0.9 release.

Starting with this release, the development of reactive-banana will focus on performance – the banana is ready to pull out the guns and participate in the benchmarking game. (You see, the logo is no idle threat!) In fact, John Lato has put together a set of benchmarks for different FRP libraries. Unfortunately, reactive-banana took a severe beating there, coming out as the slowest contender. Oops. The main problem is that the library uses a stack of monad transfomers in an inner loop – bad idea.

Now, optimizing monad transformers seems to be an issue of general interest, but the only public information I could find was a moderately useful wiki page. If you have any tips or benchmarks for optimizing monad transformer stacks, please let me and the community know!

The other major addition to the reactive-banana library is a module Reactive.Banana.Prim which presents the core algorithm in such a way that you can use it to implement your very own FRP API. Essentially, it implements a basic FRP system on top of which you can implement richer semantics – like observable sharing, recursion, simultaneous events, change notification, and so on. Of course, few people will ever want to do that, also given that reactive-banana is currently not the fastest fruit in the basket.

But this new module is my main motivation for releasing version 0.8. It contains the lessons that I’ve learned from implementing yet another toy FRP system for my threepenny-gui project, and it’s time to put the latter on a solid footing. In particular, it appears that widget abstractions greatly benefit from dynamic event switching, which means that future versions of Threepenny cannot do without a solid FRP subsystem.