PixieDust: Declarative Incremental User Interface Rendering Through Static Dependency Tracking

Abstract

Modern web applications are interactive. Reactive programming languages and libraries are the state-of-the-art approach for declara- tively specifying these interactive applications. However, programs written with these approaches contain error-prone boilerplate code for e ciency reasons. In this paper we present PixieDust, a declarative user-interface language for browser-based applications. PixieDust uses static de- pendency analysis to incrementally update a browser-DOM at run- time, without boilerplate code. We demonstrate that applications in PixieDust contain less boilerplate code than state-of-the-art ap- proaches, while achieving on-par performance.