The Functional, the Imperative, and the Sudoku: Getting Good, Bad, and Ugly to Get Along (Functional Pearl)

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that the benefits of functional programming no longer apply in the presence of even a small amount of imperative code, as if the addition of imperative code effectively subtracts. And yet, as we show in this paper, combining functional programming with the special imperative language Esterel provides a multiplicative improvement to the benefits of functional programming. The key to the benefit of both Esterel and functional programming stems from a restriction that both share. As in functional programming, where only the inputs to a function determine its outputs, the state of an Esterel computation is fully determined by the program’s input and the state that the computation had in the previous time step, where the notion of a time step is explicit in the language. Esterel’s guarantee holds even though Esterel programs feature concurrent threads, mutable state, and the ability to create, suspend, and even terminate threads as the computation proceeds. This similarity is the root of the benefits that programmers accrue as they informally reason about their program’s behavior. To illustrate these benefits, the bulk of this paper consists of an in-depth exploration of HipHop code (a mashup of JavaScript and Esterel) that implements a Sudoku solver, showing how it is possible to write code that is as easy to understand as if it were written in a pure functional programming style, even though it uses multiple threads, mutable state, thread preemption, and even thread abortion. Even better, concurrent composition and task canceling provide significant program structuring benefits that allow a clean decomposition and task separation in the solver.