Syndicate

Devlog

Feb 12, 2025

Syndicate-friendly keywords

Originally, the Klee interpreter plan was a very traditional Scheme-like language. The main issue with this is that it misses out on all the lovely features of the Syndicated Actor Model that are particularly useful for rendering responsive graphics. The best example of this is the during behavior which is a common theme in syndicate implementations. This behavior frames an actor’s action to when a value is being asserted. Adding this type of behavior to Klee would allow for shape definitions like this:

Syntax Experiments

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.

During

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.

Overview

A diagram of 2 actors, A and B asserting fragments of a klee program to a third actor, K.

Two Syndicate actors, A and B, make assertions into a Klee dataspace.

Background

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?

Ambient Dataspaces

hello

Work-in-progress for now. Will be similar in functionality to the tuplespaces in AmbientTalk