[seanmcdirmid]

I've glanced at the PLDI paper and would definitely consider Elm to be FRP, more in Conal's vision than say Flapjax. But I don't get what new contribution Elm makes to push-based FRP beyond being a nice implementation of it?

[wheatBread]

The most novel stuff was about how to handle asynchrony and concurrency without unexpected/unwanted glitches, though I think formulating things in a way that is simple, accessible, and efficient was important too. My thesis ( http://www.testblogpleaseignore.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/... ) goes through all of the previous literature that I could find at the time. It frames my view on Elm fits into prior work and how I understood things at that time, but that section got cut from the PLDI version unfortunately.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ok, fair enough. I never tried calling my work FRP before since...well, I threw out the functions and embraced glitches. You should have a look at Conal's vertigo work if you haven't already. It will give you cool things to do functionally with your GPU support.

http://conal.net/Vertigo/

[wheatBread]

Ah, cool! I think he told me about this work when we chatted at ICFP last year, but wasn't able to find it. So thanks for the link!

[seanmcdirmid]

One thing that this work requires is some from of symbolic differentiation. Basically, given some expression e, you have to compute, via a symbolic analysis on e's structure, a derivative for e, e'. e' can then be used to compute normals used for shading, replacing the need for a hand crafted normal map (you can also approximate normals via sampling, but if you have a functional definition of a surface, why not just use derivatives!).

This definitely requires some compiler support, but the purity of Elm should be helpful in that regard.