Containers and Aggregates, Mutators and Isolates for Reactive Programming

Many programs have an inherently reactive nature imposed by the functional dependencies between their data and ex-ternal events. Classically, these dependencies are dealt with using callbacks. Reactive programming with first-class reac-tive values is a paradigm that aims to encode callback logic in declarative statements. Reactive values concisely define dependencies between singular data elements, but cannot ef-ficiently express dependencies in larger datasets. Orthogo-nally, embedding reactive values in a shared-memory con-currency model convolutes their semantics and requires syn-chronization. This paper presents a generic framework for reactive programming that extends first-class reactive val-ues with the concept of lazy reactive containers, backed by several concrete implementations. Our framework addresses concurrency by introducing reactive isolates. We show ex-amples that our programming model is efficient and conve-nient to use