31–40 of 158 posts
That's a lot of very high hurdles to clear. Even if this magically solved all my scaling and distributed system problems forever, I'm not sure it'd be worth it. Good luck to them though for being ambitious.
Whoa, I just started building something similar for scrapscript! Curious: Who is the target demographic for this service? Hobbyists? I'm also interested in what benefits unison touts specifically. Is the only reason to choose unison over Cloudflare's workers the conveniences of functional typing and other ergonomics?
This may be more of a comp. sci. answer than you're looking for, but the thing I find most unique is the content-addressed functional language underlying it. Content-addressed meaning that definitions can be identified with "a hash of the AST", which is used as the building block for distributed programming: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/ I see the unison.cloud service itself as more of a first large-…
Pretty cool stuff. Anyone ever make a babel plugin that would check for identical function definitions?
Is Unison something I can easily self host? I wouldn't want to be vendor locked to Unison Cloud.
The "real" cloud platform providing the fancy distributed compute and storage fabric, deployment with a function call, etc, isn't open source - selling this product in various forms is how we are sustainable as a business.
If you're at a company and want to deploy "Unison Cloud in a box" on your own infra or in your own VPC then that's something that's doable and I'd love to talk more - feel free to email hello@unison.cloud.
If you're just an individual wanting to do cloud stuff at small scale on your own infra, that's probably harder for us to support right now. I'd recommend just using the free tier or starter tier of our public cloud. Even if we had some sort of free self-hosting option for cloud, there's economies of scale you'd miss out on so it could easily be more expensive anyway!
Not to mention, time is valuable https://www.unison-lang.org/blog/developer-productivity-real... We've built a nicely managed public cloud that eliminates huge swaths of tedious work. If you're happy to pay for that, then it's a good fit. If you prefer to self-host all the things, even for personal-use scale, then I totally understand that but Unison Cloud probably isn't the best fit right now.
Hope that helps!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be more of a comp. sci. answer than you're looking for, but the thing I find most unique is the content-addressed functional language underlying it. Content-addressed meaning that definitions can be identified with "a hash of the AST", which is used as the building block for distributed programming: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/ I see the unison.cloud service itself as more of a first large-…
In a weird way, it's what JDSL wanted to be https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect
It looks like to use this product, I have to learn an entirely new programming language (which appears to be a weird mashup of Python and Haskell), a whole set of entirely new API's, I can only host my stuff on their for-pay cloud infrastructure, and I can't use source control? That's a lot of very high hurdles to clear. Even if this magically solved all my scaling and distributed system problems forever, I'm not sur…
The odd thing is unison started purely as a language. Now there's a platform.
I'd love to hear some opinions from outside Unison about how they like using this language, tooling and hosting.
I don't "get" Unison the language, could someone explain how it's different than other languages? Is it something like tRPC combined with serverless, but at a language level?
Unison's core difference is that your code is not stored as regular text files; instead your functions and types are stored as a hash of their AST. This enables nice dependency management workflow and makes things like renaming functions trivial. The thing to remember is that your functions are programmatically tracked. Based on that core difference we built a platform that can deploy those arbitrary hashes (and all their dependencies) to different locations in a cluster, and we created a Unison library so that folks can describe how their code should be shipped across cloud computing resources. So you have Unison code describing and orchestrating Unison services.
It looks like to use this product, I have to learn an entirely new programming language (which appears to be a weird mashup of Python and Haskell), a whole set of entirely new API's, I can only host my stuff on their for-pay cloud infrastructure, and I can't use source control? That's a lot of very high hurdles to clear. Even if this magically solved all my scaling and distributed system problems forever, I'm not sur…
Unison Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37500406 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)
Unison Language and Platform Roadmap - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36333409 - June 2023 (23 comments)
A look at Unison: a revolutionary programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34307552 - Jan 2023 (84 comments)
The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33638045 - Nov 2022 (113 comments)
Unison Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652677 - June 2021 (131 comments)
Unison: A Content-Addressable Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156370 - Jan 2020 (12 comments)
The Unison language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22009912 - Jan 2020 (141 comments)
Unison – A statically-typed purely functional language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20807997 - Aug 2019 (25 comments)
Unison: a next-generation programming platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512955 - May 2015 (128 comments)