FRP and Functional Game Programming

Functional Reactive Programming is the functional version of reactive programming - which encodes the state in terms of reacting to external events. It has a seductive simplicity in its principles, and is used for instance for native user interfaces.

How does it fare when used in games, where a lot happens all the time, and state can evolve to high levels of complexity? This talk will discuss the pros and cons of working with FRP, based on the experience of writing a casual game in Haskell.

Talk objectives:

- give a small intro to what FRP is

- show with examples how the FRP network grows with the number of elements in the game

- how to work with ephemeral state parts

- how to have several subnetworks for stages of the game (levels, etc)

- how to improve performance by putting some of the subnetworks to sleep when they're out of view

Target audience:

- Functional programmers, preferably with at least a beginner's knowledge of Haskell, who are interested in games or how far you can take the concept of FRP.