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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Forgive my ignorance of Rust, but GUI toolkits are probably the strongest candidate for OOP style development

That's so 1991. We're on to GUI's as pure functions of state these days, get on with the program :-)

There's really no such thing. You might be using pure functions from your perspective, but someone is handling all that backing layer data and mutable information.

There's no such thing as structured programming, at the assembly level it always just compiles down to conditional jumps. There's no such thing as a digital circuit, because real-world voltages are always analogue. Etc.

Yeah, but some abstractions are leakier than others. I have never hit a real-world voltage bug or conditional jump bug, as far as I remember.

Have you ever hit a bug in the implementation of immutable data? I haven't. (And I have seen a miscompiled loop, though I agree they're very rare).

Well, now that I think about it, I have seen a compiler bug in an IBM Java compiler where an if condition would never be hit, despite the code being fine and the Sun Java compiler working as expected.

Which is all dealing with retained, mutable data. Period. I'm not making the comment for the sake of pointing out _levels_ of abstraction.

I made the comment because such an abstraction doesn't at all map to reality.

> Which is all dealing with retained, mutable data. Period.

Only if you choose to model your system that way. You can push the same paradigm all the way through: immutable events, and pure functions that transform an event and a previous (immutable) state into a new state.

No, you really can’t, and that’s what all the functional/immutable evangelists don’t get: you can’t.

You’re going to recreate framebuffers and font atlases and invalidate your entire UI every single time? Good joke.

So much for "not pointing out levels of abstraction". Maybe somewhere in the guts of the low-level runtime a mutable framebuffer is being used for now, sure, but I don't care about that any more than I care about whether my processor is jumping vs doing a conditional move.

I'm not entirely convinced. Libraries like React have succeeded in web development due to the complete lack of html having an extensible component model. Native applications don't have to worry about shoehorning a workable framework into stateless document renderers.

No, this is a larger trend. Both major mobile platforms are moving in this direction as well (SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose).

Tell us more ?

Cycle.js, Callbags, etc.

Elm and React for one... and all the other similarly inspired UI libs (even SwiftUI is kind of going there)... Plus the increased interested on fp UIs for games, entity systems, etc...

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-revolution-of-pure-vie...

Check out these articles surveying the landscape of reactive UI, from the same author as the linked article:

https://raphlinus.github.io/ui/druid/2019/11/22/reactive-ui....

https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/druid/2020/09/25/principled...

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