My programming life at the moment has been split between the worlds of Syndicate and Folk. They are both reactive programming systems that have a ton of conceptual overlap, so I have been trying to figure out a way to combine the two in a nice way so that I can eventually utilize the Ambient Networking, Graphics, and Audio work I’ve been iterating on in Syndicate world, from Folk, and use the physical interface Folk provides to interact with Syndicate actors.
In traditional Syndicate implementations, entities respond to patterns that get asserted to dataspaces. In the Rust implementation of Syndicate, there are two levels of state management, Actors, which have fields that are globally accessible to all Entities within that actor.
Syndicate-rs also allows individual Entities to hold internally-managed state. This means for each single Entity, there can be one associated Rust struct that can hold data.
One way I’ve been working on Klee, is to sketch out example programs and explain how they should behave, before the implementation can sufficiently execute the commands I’m drawing out.
The during keyword is used in proper syndicate implementations, and plays the same roll in Klee. It takes the default form:
(during P <E_b> <E> <E_r>)
P is the pattern we are matching the dataspace against
E_b denotes “expression before” and is the expression run for a defined amount of time “before” the assertion appears. The idea here is to have three dedicated lifetimes of a shape “before” “during” and “after”. Because we cannot predict the future, before instead needs to start when the assertion is first asserted, and as mentioned previously, lives for a defined amount of time in this state. One major use case for this is fade-in animations.
Two Syndicate actors, A and B, make assertions into a Klee dataspace.
The problem: We have an actor that has a rich internal model of some domain, and we want to use this model to generate a graphic design and render it to the user, how do we do this?
Work-in-progress for now. Will be similar in functionality to the tuplespaces in AmbientTalk