Reactive Streams: Semantics & Challenges

This lecture introduces the semantics of Reactive Streams, focusing on back-pressure and flow control in asynchronous systems. It explains the need for back-pressure and provides motivating examples. The Reactive Streams initiative, its components, ecosystem, and canonical examples are discussed. The lecture also covers methods as signals, the Reactive Streams specification, and the challenge of resource efficiency. It addresses producer and consumer synchronization, resource management, failure handling, and separating business logic from plumbing. The interoperability challenge and a summary of the lecture are also presented.