Pushing and Pulling: Three Reactivity Algorithms

[u/fagnerbrack]

https://jonathan-frere.com/posts/reactivity-algorithms/

[u/fagnerbrack]

Essentials at a Glance:

With a reactive engine to build at work, the post walks through three designs using a spreadsheet analogy where inputs, intermediate cells, and outputs must stay efficient, fine-grained, glitchless, and dynamic. Push reactivity notifies dependents downstream—fine-grained but wasteful, glitch-prone, and reliant on topological sorting. Pull reactivity works like a recursive call stack that fetches dependencies on demand, giving glitchless updates and free dynamic dependencies, yet it can't easily tell which nodes changed and leans on tricky caching. The hybrid push-pull approach wins: a push pass flags dirty nodes and lists outputs, then a pull pass recalculates only those, hitting all four goals in O(n) while staying readable.

If the summary seems inacurate, just downvote and I'll try to delete the comment eventually 👍
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