The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
1–10 of 116 posts
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#2how is this different from apache beam? also, any orgs using this at scale?
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#3I had to dig for the distributed part but it's outlined here: https://www.unison-lang.org/articles/distributed-datasets/
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#4"Each Unison definition is identified by a hash of its syntax tree." [0]
I remember many years ago, i had the same idea on how to correctly version a dependency.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#5I had to dig for the distributed part but it's outlined here: https://www.unison-lang.org/articles/distributed-datasets/
But the only runtime available for this sort of application seems to be the "unison cloud" that is a hosted service.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#6Discussion from
- a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652677
- 8 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512955
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#7I’m excited for ideas like this to become mainstream. Today’s approaches to heterogeneous and distributed computing are how I imagine single core computing was 40 years ago. You have to manually manage practically everything. Instead, let the compiler or interpreter or whatever figure out where to actually run it (CPU vs ALU vs GPU vs remote machine #42), what to keep in what part of cache (L1 vs L2 vs RAM vs disk vs S3), etc.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#8"Each Unison definition is identified by a hash of its syntax tree." [0] I remember many years ago, i had the same idea on how to correctly version a dependency. [0]: https://www.unison-lang.org/learn/the-big-idea/
Does Unison have stack traces? Using the hash of the ast as the only identifier seems like it would lose some useful runtime debugging information.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#9- Function definitions stored in a content-addressed database.
- Dependency management handled the same way the Nix handles it.
- Some kind of object storage system that uses content-addressable structures as the schema.
- Hyperlinked codebase.
- Human-readable function names as (essentially) git tags.
These ideas are all pretty nice. A dedicated IDE for this language would be a lot of fun to work with. The debugging story likewise seems like it will be pretty solid. I'm not sold on the zero config storage layer: basic object retrieval is different than schema prepared for query performance. I'd like to learn more about the concurrency and synchronization story.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#10I think they are making a mistake that's common in this sort of project: trying too many new things at once!
They already have a very innovative way of managing source code, with a database of definitions that keeps the hash of the syntax tree instead of actual source. That's a very neat idea that solves many problems (read their docs to understand why).
But instead of developing that well enough so that it works with source control tools, IDEs, can be deployed easily and painlessly on existing infrastructure... no, they decided to ALSO solve distributed computing, a really, really complex space with a pretty crowded space of solutions... and seem to be focusing on that now instead of the "original" ideas. Looks like a huge issue with scope creep to me... unless they are kind of pivoting to distributed computing now only because the original ideas were not attractive enough for people to embrace it, but I have not heard of anything like that, everyone seems to be pretty vibed by those things.