reflex VS reflex-platform

There's other people around here who would like to know your opinion about these GUI frameworks! I haven't written a GUI in Rust personally, but my favorite GUI framework is not at all OOP: https://reflex-frp.org/

Not to be confused with Reflex, allowing web apps in pure Haskell: https://reflex-frp.org/

FRP solutions sound very attractive. But reflex seems to be stuck on the outdated GHCJS, and I haven't been able to get it to build. The newer JS output in GHC doesn't yet have DOM support. And even if I used one of those, figuring out how to interact with a LaTeX renderer might be tricky.

I only have experience using Reflex, which I regard as the main contender for FRP UI libraries in the Haskell sphere. It's got a flashy website, but I think the documentation is a bit disorganized -- it took a long time for me to figure out how to get going with the library (you find some pieces of knowledge scattered here and there, if you look hard enough). My plan was to learn it well enough to onboard other people, but I don't think I could convince anyone who hasn't already decided that they're gonna make UIs in Haskell no matter the required effort.

Once someone has spent a bunch of time with Haskell and sees the value, they will find Nix if it makes sense. Maybe they'll want to play with https://reflex-frp.org, or they'll discover they want a better way to package 3rd-party dependencies, or they start using NixOS and want to nix all the things, etc. etc. Or, maybe they'll never find a use for it, and that's okay.

Reflex natively supports iOS, along with Android, desktop and web. I would recommend it for functional reactive programming in Haskell: https://reflex-frp.org

It's been awhile since I've tried to get into Ubuntu Touch/Linux mobile development in earnest. I'm currently working on an app using the reflex framework that I hope to eventually target Android, iOS, Desktop, and Linux Mobile.

If you're talking about the current Elm approach, I'm not sure. Otherwise, the paper I linked to notes some of the FRP libraries that existed at the time, some of which are still supported today (like reactive-banana), and otherwise I'd suggest looking at reflex, mentioned in the first post in this thread. I don't think it existed at the time the Elm paper came out.

We used reflex-frp, so our app was a webview that worked on localhost and Android. The docs say it also works on iOS but we don't have an iPhone.

The process was learning Functional Reactive Programming, then learning reflex-frp, then getting a contract with obsidian (creators of reflex) for one hour a week where we could ask questions.

( https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform )

We had a grant requirement to create a phone client for Tahoe-LAFS, a Python application with a bunch of dependencies, including ZFEC, a forward error correction library.

( https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/ )

( https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec/ )

We needed bug for bug compatibility with the Python codebase, so I ran Tahoe on localhost and tested the Haskell client against the Python server. We used servant to build the API, since it builds both client and server side from the same description.

( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant )

The type classes do take a toll on performance, but in reflex-platform we change GHC's default flags to make the situation a lot better. It's still not ideal, but our performance winds up being OK for real applications. The most important part is that the performance scales reasonably well as the application grows. It might probably be good at some point to use backpack instead of a typeclass so that specialization can be enforced - though I'd prefer if GHC gave a way to just force specialization more effectively.

Obelisk / reflex-platform contain nix-based solutions to building Haskell code for mobile, so you might be interested in checking out how they do it (or just using them).

In this series of posts, we will describe how a Haskell web application can be developed using reflex-platform. reflex-platform offers reflex and reflex-dom packages. reflex package is the Haskell implementation of Functional reactive programming (FRP). reflex-dom library contains a large number of functions, classes, and types used when dealing with DOM. The packages are separated as it is possible to use the FRP approach not only for web-development. We will develop theTodo List application that allows carrying out various manipulations on the task list.

reflex-platform

To clarify the situation, the canonical way to develop reflex-dom projects is to start from the reflex-platform. See here: https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform/blob/develop/docs/project-development.rst

This might also be coming from the tests of the library (even if they can run in the browser, their tests might not). You can disabled tests using an overrides attribute in project.nix (if using reflex-stone). You can see what it should look like here : https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform/blob/develop/project/default.nix#L79. You should add this attribute at the same level where "useWarp = true;" is. This should then have lines like "diagrams = pkgs.haskell.lib.dontCheck super.diagrams;" for example if you want to disable the tests for the diagrams package.

then you compile to js using ghcjs like this, then closure compile and gzip it to get the size way down. Then it just becomes a normal script you include wherever you need it.