Reactive Programming in Standard ML

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Standard ML library that provides primitives for reactive programming, enabling the development of reactive systems through a low-level framework suitable for prototyping and extending reactive language features.

Contribution

It presents a novel library for Standard ML that facilitates reactive programming by offering foundational primitives for building reactive behaviors.

Findings

Library enables reactive system development in Standard ML

Framework supports prototyping extensions to reactive languages

Provides a basis for more sophisticated reactive programming tools

Abstract

Reactive systems are systems that maintain an ongoing interaction with their environment, activated by receiving input events from the environment and producing output events in response. Modern programming languages designed to program such systems use a paradigm based on the notions of instants and activations. We describe a library for Standard ML that provides basic primitives for programming reactive systems. The library is a low-level system upon which more sophisticated reactive behaviors can be built, which provides a convenient framework for prototyping extensions to existing reactive languages.