Declarative/imperative are models, not necessarily implementations (although they often are treated as model x = implementation x). You need to separate the two conceptually, but in implementation you can do both. Anything you can do declaratively you can do imperatively and the reverse.
As such it makes it meaningless to say that almost nothing is declarative because how you choose to create it is a choice. How well it runs is another matter because real hardware is relentlessly state-y, but that's an implementation issue. And that's fine, and sometimes imperative stuff is just cleaner.
But you can write a web browser or a GUI or whatever declaratively, but underneath it will be imperative because that's hardware.
Declarative vs imperative is a choice, not necessarily a 'natural' thing, (depending on the problem, I'd say a web page renderer is distinctly stateless - take some static HTNL, render it, where's the state?). A web server can be stateless too, a request comes in, a web page goes out. I need someone else to speak for others, pretty sure stateless GUIs have been written.
Any big data cruncher that works on petabytes, purely with output coming from input deterministically is effectively stateless.
Nothing is declarative or imperative outside of a certain implementation of a solution. All of the things named trivially have declarative solutions because of Turing completeness. Whether or not a paradigm lends itself easily to something is a bit of a different question, but I think a lot of people tend to say “oh, that’s obviously stateful and imperative” merely because they haven’t thought about the problem in a different way.
Turing machines only model mathematical functions. They cannot model anything on my list. That's why computer scientists invented I/O automata in an attempt to build a theoretical model that handles some of those items on my list.
> “oh, that’s obviously stateful and imperative” merely because they haven’t thought about the problem in a different way.
It doesn't need to because it's implementation details.
Where it's needed such as in modelling the very important implementation detail of parallelism on multi-core machines to ensure correctness (such as with model checkers like Spin) then stuff like buchi automata are used, but that's dragging maths into the real world to solve real world problems. Turing machines don't live in the real world.
We know a Turing machine can't model all aspects of concurrency because a Turing machine with threads can compute an integer of unbounded size while there's always a bound on the greatest integer an unthreaded Turing machine can.
But this is all naval-gazing anyway. What's even the point of a purely-declarative OS when it's either gonna:
1. Act as a glorified C preprocessor for an imperative language like Haskell and its do-notation?
Haskell with do-notation is not imperative, that’s a common misconception. It’s a special syntax for working within a monad that desugars to nested function calls.
Typically declarative systems are interesting because it is easier to prove strong properties about them.
I agree. Declarative systems are interesting. I am not against studying, implementing, or understanding declarative OSes from an intellectual viewpoint. Rather, people generally speaking ignore that the declarative perspective is not teleological and doesn't reflect the teleology of an underlying OS.
Imperative programs are so popular among "joe schmoe" average programmers because they have a clear teleology. People are willing to forgive that imperative programs are harder to formally reason about because they make the teleology clearer. But have you seen declarative code? Because it's like math formulas, each function needs the same kind of documentation in order to understand the teleology behind the function.
Declarative/imperative are models, not necessarily implementations (although they often are treated as model x = implementation x). You need to separate the two conceptually, but in implementation you can do both. Anything you can do declaratively you can do imperatively and the reverse.
As such it makes it meaningless to say that almost nothing is declarative because how you choose to create it is a choice. How well it runs is another matter because real hardware is relentlessly state-y, but that's an implementation issue. And that's fine, and sometimes imperative stuff is just cleaner.
But you can write a web browser or a GUI or whatever declaratively, but underneath it will be imperative because that's hardware.
Declarative vs imperative is a choice, not necessarily a 'natural' thing, (depending on the problem, I'd say a web page renderer is distinctly stateless - take some static HTNL, render it, where's the state?). A web server can be stateless too, a request comes in, a web page goes out. I need someone else to speak for others, pretty sure stateless GUIs have been written.
Any big data cruncher that works on petabytes, purely with output coming from input deterministically is effectively stateless.