Virtualizing Real-World Objects in FRP

11 years 12 months ago

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We begin with a functional reactive programming (FRP) model in which every program is viewed as a signal function that converts a stream of input values into a stream of output values. We observe that objects in the real world – such as a keyboard or sound card – can be thought of as signal functions as well. This leads us to a radically diﬀerent approach to I/O – instead of treating real-world objects as being external to the program, we expand the sphere of inﬂuence of program execution to include them within the program. We call this virtualizing real-world objects. We explore how even virtual objects, such as GUI widgets, and non-local eﬀects, such as are needed for debugging (using something that we call a “wormhole”) and random number generation, can be handled in the same way. Our methodology may at ﬁrst seem na¨ıve – one may ask how we prevent a virtualized device from being copied, thus potentially introducing non-determinism as one part of a program com...

Daniel Winograd-Cort, Hai Liu, Paul Hudak

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