Last month, the GNU Guile project celebrated the 3rd anniversary of its 2.0 release with a hacker potluck. Guilers were encouraged to bring a tasty hack to the mailing list to share with everyone. My dish was a simple functional reactive programming library.

Functional reactive programming (FRP) provides a way to describe time-varying values and their relationships using a functional and declarative programming style. To understand what this means, let’s investigate a typical variable definition in Scheme. The expression (define c (+ a b)) defines the variable c to be the sum of variables a and b at the time of evaluation. If a or b is assigned a new value, c remains the same. However, for applications that deal with state that transforms over time, it would be convenient if we could define c to react to changes in a and b by recomputing the sum. Contrast this approach with the more traditional style of modeling dynamic state via events and callbacks. A lot of programmers, myself included, have written code with so many callbacks that the resulting program is unmaintainable spaghetti code. Callback hell is real, but if you accept FRP into your heart then you will be saved!

By now you’re probably wondering: “What the hell does all this mean?” So, here’s a real-world example of guile-2d’s FRP API:

( define-signal position ( signal-fold v+ ( vector2 320 240 ) ( signal-map ( lambda ( v ) ( vscale v 4 ) ) ( signal-sample game-agenda 1 key-arrows ) ) ) )

In guile-2d, time-varying values are called “signals”. The above signal describes a relationship between the arrow keys on the keyboard and the position of the player. signal-sample is used to trigger a signal update upon every game tick that provides the current state of the arrow keys. key-arrows is a vector2 that maps to the current state of the arrow keys, allowing for 8 direction movement. This vector2 is then scaled 4x to make the player move faster. Finally, the scaled vector is added to the previous player position via signal-fold . The player’s position is at (320, 240) initially. As you can see, there are no callbacks and explicit mutation needed. Those details have been abstracted away, freeing the programmer to focus on more important things.

I think it’s helpful to see FRP in action to really appreciate the magic. So, check out this screencast!

To see all of the juicy implementation details, check out the git repository. Thanks for following along!