Maintainability of functional reactive programs in a telecom server software

Abstract

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is claimed to be a good choice for event handling applications. Current objectoriented telecom applications are known to suffer from additional complexity due to event handling code. In this paper we study the maintainability of FRP programs in the telecom domain compared to traditional object-oriented programming (OOP), with the motivation that higher maintainability increases the service quality and decreases the costs. Two implementations of the same procedure are created: one using Haskell and the reactive-banana FRP framework and one using C++ and the OOP paradigm. Four software experts each with over 20 years of experience and three development engineers working on a product subject to study were engaged in evaluations, based on a questionnaire involving five different aspects of maintainability. The evaluations indicate a higher maintainability profile for FRP compared with OOP. This is confirmed by a more detailed analysis of the code size.