Tackling the awkward squad for reactive programming: the actor-reactor model

Abstract

In his famous paper entitled Tackling the Awkward Squad, Peyton Jones studies how features that traditionally did not fit in the functional programming paradigm can be added to a functional language via careful language design (e.g. using monads), instead of allowing programmers to sprinkle around impure expressions and ad-hoc library calls, thereby turning the entire program into a non-functional program. Similarly, in this paper, we identify a number of code characteristics that do not map onto the reactive programming paradigm but that are present in many real life reactive programs. We propose a novel Actor-Reactor model that can serve as the basis for future language designs that allow a programmer to use the awkward squad without making the reactive parts of the program accidentally non-reactive.