research-article

A survey on reactive programming

Authors:

Engineer Bainomugisha,

Andoni Lombide Carreton,

Tom van Cutsem,

Stijn Mostinckx,

Wolfgang de MeuterAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), Volume 45, Issue 4

Article No.: 52, Pages 1 - 34

https://doi.org/10.1145/2501654.2501666

Published: 30 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Reactive programming has recently gained popularity as a paradigm that is well-suited for developing event-driven and interactive applications. It facilitates the development of such applications by providing abstractions to express time-varying values and automatically managing dependencies between such values. A number of approaches have been recently proposed embedded in various languages such as Haskell, Scheme, JavaScript, Java, .NET, etc. This survey describes and provides a taxonomy of existing reactive programming approaches along six axes: representation of time-varying values, evaluation model, lifting operations, multidirectionality, glitch avoidance, and support for distribution. From this taxonomy, we observe that there are still open challenges in the field of reactive programming. For instance, multidirectionality is supported only by a small number of languages, which do not automatically track dependencies between time-varying values. Similarly, glitch avoidance, which is subtle in reactive programs, cannot be ensured in distributed reactive programs using the current techniques.

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Index Terms

A survey on reactive programming
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
      2. Language types

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Published In

ACM Computing Surveys Volume 45, Issue 4

August 2013

490 pages

ISSN:0360-0300

EISSN:1557-7341

DOI:10.1145/2501654

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 30 August 2013

Accepted: 01 August 2012

Revised: 01 December 2011

Received: 01 May 2010

Published in CSUR Volume 45, Issue 4

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MobiCrant project in the context of the InnovIris (the Brussels Institute for Research and Innovation)
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56081-9
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https://doi.org/10.3390/a17020056
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