What do libraries like React and Dear Imgui or paradigms like Data-oriented design and Data-driven programming have in common?
One aspect is that they all rely on explictly modeling an application’s state as data.
What do I mean by hidden state?
Now you will probably think: of course, I do that too. What other way is there, really? Let me give you an example, from the widely used Qt library:
QMessageBox box;
msgBox.setText("explicitly modeled data!");
msgBox.exec();
So this appears to be harmless, but is actually one of the most common cases were state is modeled implicitly. But we’re explicitly setting data there, you say. That is not the problem. The exec() call is the problem. It is blocking until the the message box is closed again, thereby implicitly modeling the “This message box is shown” state by this thread’s instruction pointer and position on the call stack. The instruction pointer is now tied to this state: while it does not move out of that function, the message box is still shown.
This is usually not a big problem, but it demonstrates nicely how state can be hidden unintentionally in an application. And even a small thing like this already prevents you from doing certain things, for example easily serializing your complete UI state.
Is it bad?
This cannot really be avoided while keeping some kind of conceptual separation between code and data. It can sure be minimized. But is it bad? Well, it is certainly good to know when you’re using implicit state like that. And there’s one critiria for when it should most certainly minimized as much as possible: highly interactive programs, like user interfaces, games, machine control systems and AI agents.
These kinds of programs usually have some spooky and sponteanous interactions between different, seemlingly unrelated objects, and weird transitions between states. And using the call-stack and instruction pointer to model those states makes them particularly unsuitable to being interacted with.
Alternatives?
So what can you use instead? The tried and tested alternative is always a state-machine. There are also related alternatives like behavior trees, which are actually quite similar to a “call stack in data” but much more flexible. Hybrid solutions that move only bits of the code into the realm of data are promises/futures and coroutines. Both effectively allow a “linear” function to be decoupled from its call-stack, and be treated more like data. And if their current popularity is any indicator, that is enough for many applications.
What do you think? Should hidden state like this always be avoided?
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