I have been researching FRP for about a year now without finding or discovering an implementation I like. I don’t know if there is one — maybe my standards are just too high. However, it has initiated me into the more general interest of purely functional foundations.

Since I am tired of thinking and want to start hacking again, I am abandoning FRP proper for the time being. But I am continuing in spirit, by continuing with foundations. I will be developing this project in the Frag repository, where I keep my FRP stuff.

The idea of the Frag project is simple: get back to making the software I want to make — mostly games — but shun IO. I.e. the content of these will only be built on semantically meaningful abstractions (which are in turn implemented on IO, of course), but without concern for making it a “perfect” FRP implementation. Said abstractions will go in the Frag project. The main point is to get away from the world of fuzzy, complex operational semantics, replacing it lazily with simple denotational ones.

But this is a foundational project, meaning that once the foundations are replaced, I allow myself to do arbitrary software engineering on top of it. I think this is an important point.

Currently in the repository is a simple Event abstraction. I’m seeing how much I can write with just that, without worrying about modeling conceptually continuous things (like mouse position). Secretly my plan is to accidentally come across a good interaction model which boils down to Event, and is thus inherently meaningful (simplicity can be refined out later).

I’m having trouble foreseeing how I will model eg. network interaction using Events. Graphical games are pretty easy, since conceptually they always exist, and you’re just choosing to view them. I can’t see how network fits into a model like this, since a network program can have side-effects on another computer. Can anyone think of a way that network interactions are about being instead of doing?