I took a similar approach in my Racket library, gui-easy[1,2]. Though I opted to...

I took a similar approach in my Racket library, gui-easy[1,2]. Though I opted to not defer any computations. Any observable (similar to a signal from the post) update propagates to observers immediately, and there's no incrementality -- observables are just boxes whose changes you can subscribe to. Regarding the disposal problem, I used weak references and regarding the where to take observables and where to take concrete values as input question, I decided that any place an observable can go in, a concrete value can as well and it's been a convenient choice so far. For fun, here's an example[3] that builds the todo UI from the post.