Relational Reactive Programming: miniKanren for the Web

Abstract

Over the past decade, reactive frameworks and languages have become the dominant programming paradigm in front-end web development. In this paradigm, user actions change application state, and those changes propagate reactively to derived state and to the display, reducing the likelihood that various parts of the data model and user-facing view will become out of sync due to programmer error. In this paper, we explore the application of relational programming to the specification and synchronized evolution of model and view across time in response to user input. To that end, we present a reactive Javascript implementation of miniKanren and an integrated reactive programming model oriented towards the challenges of front-end web development.