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Reagent is theoretically the best of ReactiveX

    Jan 27, 2025
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    This extended article discusses the merits of Jake Wharton's Reagent framework for Kotlin which has deep theoretical advantages standing in for ReactiveX. I've stripped away any class definitions to make a lightweight functional version that I'll derive and justify from first principles here, with implementations for Hacklang, Javascript and Kotlin. Jake Wharton has put the project on hiatus, and while I agree that it's hard to fight the massive mindshare of ReactiveX, Reagent is at least a powerful lens to the semantics of streaming and the minimum that we require of our languages to make them reactive. At least I hope to convey that if one feels ReactiveX is wasteful on top of an async-await language, their feeling isn't wrong.

    The maximum is in the middle

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    Using lambda term statistics to show how hard we try to declutter programs

    Aug 20, 2020

    There are a couple of [a]symmetries in programming that really grip me, lifting my hands off the keyboard and pushing me deep into a mind vortex for some time. I'm especially entranced by the flows of control, data and abstraction it seems. When arguments and returns are treated differently (in a symmetry s…

    Condensed Asterius quickstart

    Jun 20, 2020

    Here's an Asterius quickstart that aims to be a little more make-it-work-oriented than the official docs…

    deepseq for Data

    Jun 13, 2020

    Here's a very short but useful snippet I recently started using to force Data instances deeply…

    Reified types in Hack

    Feb 1, 2020

    Hack is beginning to support reified types in their latest 4.17 release, which adds a very interesting dimension to Hack's type system. Its interactions with Hack's unique medley of type features can be quite subtle, and when any new type feature emerges, I always like to learn how and where it interacts with o…

    Simplifying reactive operators

    Sep 2, 2019

    I've argued that I have reason to believe that ReactiveX (Rx) is backwards. At first I promoted InteractiveX (Ix), which inverts the control, swapping callbacks for await. If you follow the road of trying to simplify Ix and its iterator acrobatics, I believe you'll arrive where I was, reimplementing Reagent. Originally built …

    Tracing values with state

      Jul 1, 2019

      The development of ra.hs has called for an interesting task in the domain of symbolic programming. ra.hs is a Haskell linter for reactive programs, the first implementation I'm undertaking to identify possible race conditions in reactive code. The violation to look for is a subtle one: if two threads consume the sa…

      Guide to InteractiveX in Kotlin

        Apr 22, 2019

        I was just peeking at Kotlin to see if they supported asynchronous generators. I wasn't expecting much, because when I was making InteractiveX implementations for PHP and Hack last year, Kotlin coroutines weren't publicly documented. Man, I got way more than I bargained for. I knew even just look…

        How to make a ReactiveX

        • Project_writeup
        • Reactive
        • Software
        Dec 11, 2018
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        I was tipped off to Reactive Frameworks from @Robert Harvey on a long-winded StackExchange question of mine for what "reactive databases" were called. I was infatuated with Hack's elegant async API and let me tell you it absolutely expanded my world in all the right ways.

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        Why ReactiveX operators are hard to make and InteractiveX operators aren't

          Dec 11, 2018
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          Full-featured reactive stream libraries, like Rx, come with a very large set of operators to create, transform, combine and otherwise process the corresponding streams. Creating your own operators with support for back-pressure is notoriously difficult.

          Coroutines and channels are designed to provide an opposite experience. There are no built-in operators, but processing streams of elements is extremely simple and back-pressure is supported automatically without you having to explicitly think about it.

          from Kotlin's guide to reactive channels

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          Logo sketches: Shard

            Nov 27, 2018

            My logo already uses forced perspective to create an illusion, so why not really force it a little harder? Shard splits polygons at random vertices and carefully hurls them in front of a camera where they appear like the original. That is... until you put a spin on them…

            Logo sketches: Trace

            Nov 27, 2018

            While designing some branding around my personal logo, I noticed the following in-spiral that felt like it was leading somewhere interesting: