Re: Ada-Oriented GUI

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Wednesday, March 21, 2018 at 10:57:09 AM UTC-5, vincent....@gmail.com wrote:
> - What are the main papers from Microsoft Research, which describe this innovative concept?

  http://www.IntroToRx.com

  The book that I mentioned above is now free.  I had the author incorrect; he is Lee Campbell, not Ian Campbell.  (Btw, I detest Amazon's lack of Apple-iOS-esque unpinch zoom-out on deficient-UI Kindle devices to read flyspeck book-cover fonts on Kindle!)  Please refer to that book's bibliography for seminal references in the history of Rx.

> - Regarding GUI, how does the concept compares to Objective-C / Smalltalk / Classic-Ada?

I am uncertain precisely what you intend there.  Rx libraries have been ported with varying degrees of fidelity from their origin in C# and .NET
1) to nearly all general-purpose languages except for Objective-C (although a Swift port exists), Smalltalk (except a Scala port exists), and not yet publicly released for Ada
and
2) to major OS GUI frameworks:  e.g., Cocoa on iOS & MacOS; Android SDK on Android OS.

Generally, Rx for C# on .NET and Rx for Java on Android are fairly clearly the 2 most actively in the driver's seat of steering the reactive-extensions community over the past several years.  A 3-way divergence has appeared among factions of the Rx community regarding whether:
a) backpressure is best handled by Ix (interactive extensions), which is the Microsoft Research viewpoint;
b) backpressure is best handled by duplicating the entire Rx world so that in addition to Observable (which lacks backpressure) there should be Flowable (whose sole reason to exist is to provide sophisticated back pressuring mechanisms with some overhead);
c) if you think that you need backpressure in Rx, you are just not right in the head, which appears to be RxSwift community's viewpoint.  Clearly, the RxSwift community envision Rx to not apply to problem spaces that can churn out immense quantities of data flow, such reading records in a file or traversing a lengthy database table.  Clearly, the RxJava and Microsoft Research Rx communities think that LINQ-esque processing is within the purview of Rx (or its sibling Ix).

Plus, the Rx family of libraries are not the only ones available.  For example, Reactive Swift and Reactive Cocoa are coming at the reactive solution space from an entirely different perspective than the RxSwift and RxCocoa libraries in the Rx family of libraries.