[reactive] Using Reactive in a commercial video game - thoughts?

[Thomas Davie]

On 16 Jun 2009, at 08:45, Ryan Trinkle wrote:

> I'm a co-founder of a game studio that will be writing in  
> (primarily) Haskell.  We're currently assembling the technology  
> stack for our first game, and I'm very interested in FRP (Reactive  
> in particular) as a way of making video game programming easier and  
> less error-prone.  However, from reading this list and discussing it  
> with people in #haskell on irc.freenode.net, it seems that there may  
> be issues blocking us from using it within our timeframe (we plan to  
> release our first game around November).
>
> What known issues would prevent Reactive from being used today in a  
> commercial video game?  Would you anticipate the discovery of many  
> critical issues in the future?  What would it take to overcome these  
> issues?

At the moment there are a couple (maybe more) of issues with reactive  
that make it basically unusable for this kind of project:
1) The way that unambiguous choice works is still not settled, every  
time someone thinks they have it right, some other little sneaky git  
of a detail comes up and shows it to be incorrect.  There's been some  
progress recently on getting this right.
2) The snapshot, mappend and join functions on events currently block  
in inconvenient ways with certain inputs.  This doesn't sound like a  
major problem, until you discover it's the *useful* inputs that they  
block on.  This issue is just a matter of getting lazyness right,  
unfortunately, various people have tried to get the lazyness right  
over the past year or so, and no one has yet succeeded.  If you were  
to get it right, I would be extremely happy.

A final note:
 From past conversations with conal, I believe he's in the process of  
migrating reactive to a different license because he wants to make  
sure that while it remains open he still gets paid for its use in  
industry.  You'll have to check this with conal though.

Bob
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