Imperative Rx

Question

Hi, I saw today Erik's (fantastic) talk from PDC'09.

He briefly mentioned that work is being done to bring imperative programming to the reactive world. I'm assuming he was talking about the dual of iterator blocks and the yield statements.

I was wondering what is the current state of this? Will it require language support?

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Omer Mor

Answer 1

we're definitely working on this. The first visible work is that in one of the recent releases, we introduced the Iterate & ListObservable / Start operators. See this discussion on how to use it:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/rx/thread/74592668-bbad-45a3-b115-72ae14064a29

 

Next to this we also have operators that are like the F# computation expressions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233182.aspx) such as If, While, Case, For etc..

In the future, language integration would of course be great, so please the people that develop your favorite language know :)

Answer 2

For the record, what I was hinting at during my PDC talk was the Iterate & ListObservable / Start operators. 

I expect that once people start to play with that pattern, they will quickly come up with all sorts of different variations of ListObservable that encode various policies for "asynchronous waiting" for results.