Reactive Ruby

Reactive Ruby
guidosalva.github.io

This is some interesting research, but for those hoping to code actual Ruby applications in a reactive style, I don't think this will give you all that you need. The main contribution here is to use a JIT with inline caches (Truffle VM) to optimize change propagation. That's some cool work, but it comes at a cost in flexibility and power, at least with the current state of the project. The framework supports only static graphs that only grow (no removing nodes), and changes must be single source (no "transactions" that handle several changes simultaneously). Those limitations are enough to make this probably not useful in "the real world." As a research project, though, using JIT w/ ICs to optimize propagation seems really promising.

    proc timeB {varname seconds} {
        upvar $varname x
        set x [clock seconds]
        after [::tcl::mathop::* $seconds 1000] [list timeB $varname $seconds]
    }

    proc onChange {varname empty op} {
        upvar $varname x
        puts $x
    }

    timeB foobar 1
    trace add variable foobar write onChange

    vwait forever

A VM with soft-realtime semantics, OTP patterns as architectural building blocks, and an almost-too-easy path toward writing distributed applications.