Reactive programming automatically maintains an application’s state when data changes. Variables are constantly re-evaluated as other variables change, allowing the program to react to data changes. Reactive programming is useful for real-time interpretation of data streams, but there are no fully implemented reactive programming languages.
Reactive programming is a computer science concept that describes the properties of a computer programming language focused on automatically maintaining the state of an application when the data used in the program changes. One of the main characteristics of a reactive programming language is that the declared and calculated variables are constantly re-evaluated as the other variables used in their calculation vary. This means that the language reacts to changes in the state of the data, rather than using more imperative commands to manage state, as many traditional programming languages do. The theoretical result of an application using reactive programming philosophies would be a program that constantly and automatically changes its display or other factors based on the changing data flowing through the program. While different imperative programming models can be used to achieve the same results as reactive programming, the goal of building a reactive language would be to have native support for reactive changes at the primitive level, rather than the object level.
One way to clarify how reactive programming works is to compare it to imperative programming. When two numbers are added in an imperative language, the result of the addition is usually stored in a certain memory location. This happens when the command is executed and the result is decoupled from the two numbers that have been added to create the sum. This means that, if one of the two added numbers changes after the addition, the value of the sum will not change because it is already stored and separated from the original operands.
When a reactive programming language adds two variables to create a sum, and one of the two variables changes at some point in the future, the sum will also change. This implies that a responsive program has the ability to monitor the state of data in use and automatically react to changes, potentially changing the overall state of the entire application. There are several models in imperative programming, including event-driven programming and observer data models, that can accomplish the same tasks by creating structures that monitor data changes, but a reactive language would have built-in mechanisms to do so.
The use of a responsive programming language could be in areas where real-time interpretation of arbitrary data streams is needed. This could include scientific visualizations, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), or even real-time communications where the program is constantly changing based on the data stream it receives. It should be noted, however, that there are actually no fully implemented, self-contained reactive programming languages. Most working implementations of the concept take the form of external libraries for more traditional imperative or functional languages.
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