[Haskell-cafe] "Best" FRP package for newbie

[Arnaud Bailly]

Hello,
I am interested in exploring more in depth FRP. I had a look at the wiki page and started to explore "reactive" which looked promising at first glance and backed by quite a few articles and tutorials, but 1) it did not install properly on my haskell platform and 2) from the mailing-list archives it seems to have died a couple of years ago.

So my question is : What package would you recommend me to get my hands dirty with FRP? I am mostly interested in things related to music and network programming, if that matters.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Arnaud

["Gabríel A. Pétursson"]

Netwire by Ertugrul Söylemez would be a good library to start with. If for some reason netwire doesn't quite suit your needs, take a look at Animas, a fork of Yampa.

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/netwire-3.1.0
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Netwire

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[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Of course, I recommend my reactive-banana library.

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Reactive-banana
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Reactive-banana/Examples

Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com

[Ertugrul Söylemez]

"Gabríel A. Pétursson" <gabr...@simnet.is> wrote:

> Netwire by Ertugrul Söylemez would be a good library to start with.
> If for some reason netwire doesn't quite suit your needs, take a look
> at Animas, a fork of Yampa.
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/netwire-3.1.0
> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Netwire

Even though Netwire seems to be the library of choice for your purposes,
it is not exactly beginner-friendly. Heinrich Apfelmus' reactive-banana
library is much easier to get into, so you may want to start with that
one before approaching Netwire.

In any case, I can't really recommend Animas or Yampa. They are a proof
of concept, but in real world applications they proved to be unfortunate
choices, which was the original motivation for me to write Netwire in
the first place.

Greets,
Ertugrul

--
nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
http://ertes.de/

[Edward Amsden]

I got started in FRP with Yampa, and I currently "maintain" Animas,
which is a fork. AFAIK no one is really doing much with either
anymore. Yampa and Animas are both messy both in implementation and
the exposed interface. I did start with Yampa, but it was incredibly
frustrating because the abstraction is very leaky and thus things
often don't work as you'd expect. The only real changes to Animas are
the addition of some primitives for evaluation when you don't want a
tight loop.

I'm currently writing a Masters thesis on FRP which will hopefully
result in a much nicer signal function library, but of course you
don't want to wait that long. What I can offer though is to try to
answer any questions you might have as you're exploring FRP.

Netwire and reactive-banana both sound like good choices, though I
haven't really toyed much with either of them so I can't really make a
firm recommendation.

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Edward Amsden
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Computer Science
Rochester Institute of Technology
www.edwardamsden.com

[Adam Duracz]

Hi Arnaud,

While not necessarily in line with the state of the art of FRP libraries, I can warmly recommend going through the parts of Paul Hudak's "Haskell School Of Expression" that cover the Functional Animation Library ("FAL", basically a light version of Fran).
The book introduces FRP concepts gently and FAL is really nice to work with, at least when it comes to the type of code that is discussed in that book.

Good luck!

//Adam

[edgar klerks]

As beginner I really liked reactive-banana. I used it in a inhouse
project for the graphical user interface (wx) and I found it easier to
use than the "imperative" approach. Unfortunately the
reactive-banana-wx package seems to be broken on 7.2.

[Arnaud Bailly]

Thanks to all for your kind answers. I already installed reactive-banana and skimmed through the doc which is quite good and extensive: at least this is a good start. Should the need arise, I will not hesitate to tap into the knowledge and wisdom of the community !

Regards,
Arnaud

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

edgar klerks wrote:
> As beginner I really liked reactive-banana. I used it in a inhouse
> project for the graphical user interface (wx) and I found it easier to
> use than the "imperative" approach. Unfortunately the
> reactive-banana-wx package seems to be broken on 7.2.

Actually, it's a weird bug in GHC 7.2 that break reactive-banana-wx.
Watching the build log on Hackage is fun: sometimes it doesn't build,
then it does build, then not. Fortunately, everything works fine on GHC
7.0.4 .

Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

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http://apfelmus.nfshost.com