The Meerkat Vision: Language Support for Live, Scalable, Reactive Web Apps

Abstract

The reactive programming paradigm has become ubiquitous for modern web and mobile app development. But despite its many benefits, today reactive programming is limited to data updates within the client, leaving to the programmer the tedious and error-prone tasks of managing updates to code and synchronizing data updates between reactive clients and a server database. In this paper, we lay out the vision for Meerkat, a tierless, reactive, and live programming language designed to scale to the needs of modern applications. We introduce the language through a chat application which runs on our prototype implementation. We then describe approaches for modularizing and scaling Meerkat programs, customizing tradeoffs between properties such as consistency and availability, supporting local-first software and rich data models, and scaling live updates to full DevOps in software organizations. The Meerkat research program will enable a new era of developing apps that are more responsive, reliable, and evolvable than ever before.