Real-World Functional Programming

Chapter 16. Developing reactive functional programs

This chapter covers

• Reacting to events and declaring them in F#
• Working with events as first-class values
• Programming GUIs using asynchronous workflows
• Using message passing concurrency

This final chapter is about reacting to external events, such as user input. We’re also going to discuss another F# feature that can be used for creating concurrent programs. Although these sound like unrelated topics, we’ll see similarities as we explore them. All of the libraries and examples we’ll see in this chapter share a similar architecture, so let’s first look at the reactive architecture in general.

A lot of the code we write (in both imperative and functional programming) assumes that it’s in ...