No description on the home page, the documentation, Github page ... mentions that this is a Haskell-like language inspired by Haskell. No credit to Haskell while the code base is 99.6% Haskell!
The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
21–30 of 116 posts
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#22I’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…
We have, though. Spark, for example, does this in just about every language. It's been around for ages, is liberally licensed, and deployed at scale in thousands of enterprises.
Spark still references functions by name though, right? So if a peer says "call this function" I have to trust both that peer AND whatever system resolves the name to some cpu instructions.
Plus you're significantly limited in how much you can memoize if you can have different versions of the "same" function.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#23I 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 wit…
I thought that was sort of Paul's goal, to explore a bunch of new ideas and paradigms. I doubt he's under any illusions that this language, qua this language, is going to see wide adoption or need to have all of its features really ironed out with a fixed/stable API. But I could be wrong!
Then that flips it back to being very cool that he is putting his energy into carrying a few batons far enough for others to pick them up.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#24how is this different from apache beam? also, any orgs using this at scale?
It's a programming language where the file representation isn't text of the code but ASTs and you can call things distributedly by a hash of that AST.
So I guess its different from apache beam in all of the ways.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#25That is the perfect programming language landing page.
The Hello World example introduces one of their concepts that you might not see every day, then they show a little algorithm, then a practical "stuff you need to get work done" example.
I got an immediate sense that the language has some familiar "ML family" type features (like F# or Scala) but also some distinctive aspects.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#26How does the runtime manage different levels of trust between clients?
How does the language grapple with code injection vulnerabilities? If I want to be able to receive data from an untrusted entity, but not code, how do I make sure they're not submitting code to my server to unpack and execute?
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#27Does anyone have a comparison with Darklang/ecosystem and it's goals?
Some of the things mentioned sound similar, at a high level.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#28I 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 wit…
To be fair, for a while they were ALSO working on their own graphical source editor that allowed for type-correct transformations and assisted refactorings. They put that on the back burner specifically because they are trying to focus on fewer things :) I think the distributed computing problem is pretty related once you have "content-addressable" source code. Agreed that it's a lot of work but I hope it pans out!
I disagree, there's no real relationship between 'content addressable' source code and distributed computing.
Also I don't think that you need to create a new language to have 'content addressable' source code distribution..
Creating yet another language ensure that this will get nowhere, too bad.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#29I’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…
We have, though. Spark, for example, does this in just about every language. It's been around for ages, is liberally licensed, and deployed at scale in thousands of enterprises.
Well, Spark does allow you to accomplish distributed workloads for certain forms of computation. But it's limited to those forms of computations (streaming, map-reduce). It also has a large operational footprint. It's also lamentable that distributed code that uses Spark looks nothing like its non-distributed counterpart.
Something very much like Spark map-reduce can be implemented in ~100 lines of Unison code:
https://www.unison-lang.org/articles/distributed-datasets/
Some videos on Unison's capabilities over and above Spark:
Distributed programming overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhoxQGzFhV8
Collaborative data structures (CRDTs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc4V2WhGMy4
Distributed data types: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOO2gtkoZ3M
Distributed global optimization with genetic algorithms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNShVqSbQJM
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, for a while they were ALSO working on their own graphical source editor that allowed for type-correct transformations and assisted refactorings. They put that on the back burner specifically because they are trying to focus on fewer things :) I think the distributed computing problem is pretty related once you have "content-addressable" source code. Agreed that it's a lot of work but I hope it pans out!
I disagree, there's no real relationship between 'content addressable' source code and distributed computing. Also I don't think that you need to create a new language to have 'content addressable' source code distribution.. Creating yet another language ensure that this will get nowhere, too bad.
My impression is that the original use case was distributed computing, and the content-addressable stuff took on a life of its own after that.