[MzHN]

This is an interesting topic so I tried to dive in a bit.

From my reading I understood that Qt signals & slots (and Qt events) are much more closely related to JavaScript events (native and custom).

In both you can explicitly emit, handle, listen to events/signals. JavaScript events seem to combine both Qt signals & slots and Qt events. Of course without the type safety.

For example, taken from https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/signalsandslots.html

"Signals are emitted by objects when they change their state in a way that may be interesting to other objects."

However what I think they are proposing in the article is a much more complex abstraction: they want to automate it so that whenever any part of a complex graph of states changes, every piece of code depending on that specific state gets notified, without the programmer explicitly writing code to notify other pieces of code, or doing connect() or addEventListener() etc.

What are your thoughts on that? I'd be interested to hear since I'm sure you have more experience than me.

[spacechild1]

This sounds interesting. The code examples reminded me of Qt signals but all the answers to my post suggest that JS signals would be much more powerful. Honestly, I'd need to take a closer look.

[naasking]

JS signals come from functional reactive programming, which is a generalization of synchronous reactive programming from the Lustre and Esterel programming languages from the 80s and 90s. I believe the first version was FrTime published in 2004.

You can think of reactive signals as combining an underlying event system with value construction, ultimately defining an object graph that updates itself whenever any of the parameters used to construct it change. You can think of this graph like an electronic circuit with multiple inputs and outputs, and like a circuit, the outputs update whenever inputs change.