Taking Back Control (Flow) of Reactive Programming

  • Sean McDirmid

REBLS |

Published by ACM - Association for Computing Machinery

Event-driven programming avoids wasting user and CPU time, but is difficult to perform since program control flow is necessarily inverted and twisted. To make reactive programming easier, many advocate burying control flow within abstractions that are composed via data flow instead. This might be a mistake: data-flow has issues with expressiveness and usability that might not pan out. Instead, control flow could be re-invented to hide the adverse affects of CPU time while preserving expressiveness and directness1 .