Reactive Semantics for User Interface Description Languages
Abstract
User Interface Description Languages (UIDLs) are high-level languages that facilitate the development of Human-Machine Interfaces, such as Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications. They usually provide first-class primitives to specify how the program reacts to an external event (user input, network message), and how data flows through the program. Although these domain-specific languages are now widely used to implement safety-critical GUIs, little work has been invested in their formalization and verification. In this paper, we propose a denotational semantic model for a core reactive UIDL, Smalite, which we argue is expressive enough to encode constructs from more realistic languages. This preliminary work may be used as a stepping stone to produce a formally verified compiler for UIDLs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.13610,
title = {Reactive Semantics for User Interface Description Languages},
author = {Basile Pesin and Celia Picard and Cyril Allignol},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.13610},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
In Proceedings ICE 2025, arXiv:2508.12308