begriffs

The Design of Purescript Halogen

July 10, 2015
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Phil Freeman, the author of Purescript, explains the design of Halogen, a declarative, type-safe UI library.

Summary

  • Purescript-halogen
    • a toolkit for building reactive web apps in purescript
    • built on signal functions and a virtual dom
  • Signals are values which change over time
    • they are functors and applicatives
  • The “stateful” combinator creates a new signal from an old one, adding a stateful input. It is called foldp in Elm or stepper
    • for example if a signal wraps up a monoid then you can define a combine function which produces a new signal of the latest mconcat’d values
  • Halogen provides a DOM templating DSL which builds a type HTML
  • A user interface can be considered a Signal HTML
    • when the signal changes, push the diffs to the DOM
  • Halogen goes beyond such simple Signals to Signal functions, i.e. type UI input = Signal input -> Signal (HTML input)
  • Signal functions do have a mathematical denotation
  • The concrete representation of signal functions in Halogen
  • Signal functions also have Functor and Applicative instances (slides have a diagram)
  • But signal functions have some additional type class instances: Profunctor, Strong, Choice
  • Signal functions also have a stateful combinator
  • Explanation of the merge combinator
  • Putting this all together, the signal functions and combinators combine to create graphs of data flow
  • In Halogen you get a lot of composability for free, which works well when defining web components
  • Components actually have a type interface: type Component m i o = SF i (HTML (m o))
  • Mixins become easy inside the graph of pure functions
    • Undo/redo
    • Routing
    • Sitemap / breadcrumbs
  • How to handle
    • Ajax
    • External input
    • Third-party code
    • Canvas, SVG, WebGL