Incremental – A library for incremental computations
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Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#2Kobe!
Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#3I have built something similar like this for my fund 7 years ago. We were doing parametric optimization on large computational graphs. I have never programmed Ocaml but my understanding is introspection is kind of a weak spot for the language. Curious language choice! I know Ocaml is fast, about 1-2x speed of C, on par with Java.
Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#4One thing I've never fully grokked is how this differs from an observable pattern where one can publish new values to inputs, propagate that through the computation, and push newly computed values to listeners.
I guess there's probably optimizations around change detection and stopping the propagation if there's no change (though observables can do that as well). The stabilize command also makes things interesting as a way to batch changes together before recomputing (but again, doable with observables too).
Is the delta primarily coming from introspection and automatically building the compute graph? Or is there something more fundamental that I'm missing?
Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#5I have built something similar like this for my fund 7 years ago. We were doing parametric optimization on large computational graphs. I have never programmed Ocaml but my understanding is introspection is kind of a weak spot for the language. Curious language choice! I know Ocaml is fast, about 1-2x speed of C, on par with Java.
Not trying to be pedantic but do you mean half the speed of C?
Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#6Goldman took the same approach with instrument pricing ~30 years ago. I recall long discussions about "Node Purpling" in my ~13 year tenure there.
Computer Science has evolved, and AFAICT this is not a graph approach, but things like differentiation are computationally expensive, and therefore you want to minimize the number of times you do it to as close to the theoretical minimum.
Edit: Related HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36006737
Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#7One thing I've never fully grokked is how this differs from an observable pattern where one can publish new values to inputs, propagate that through the computation, and push newly computed values to listeners. I guess there's probably optimizations around change detection and stopping the propagation if there's no change (though observables can do that as well). The stabilize command also makes things interesting as…
Roughly, you subscribe and listen to an observable. Incrementals are more like a cache across some DAG of computation + state that lets you optimize by only recomputing what needs to be recomputed.
There's a really good talk from Ron Minsky here: https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/seven-implementations-...
Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#8One thing i have always linked about Jane street projects is that they tend to package ideas that have existed in research or niche system into something developers can actually use. Even if you never adopt the library, the design docs are usually worth reading.
Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#9One thing I've never fully grokked is how this differs from an observable pattern where one can publish new values to inputs, propagate that through the computation, and push newly computed values to listeners. I guess there's probably optimizations around change detection and stopping the propagation if there's no change (though observables can do that as well). The stabilize command also makes things interesting as…
That's how I was thinking about it too. At first glance it feels very close to reactive programming with dependency tracking. I'm curious whether the real advantage is the API ergonomics or if there are optimizations under the hood that wouldn't be practical with a typical observable implementation.
Re: Incremental – A library for incremental computations
#10I think websharper's Var are similar to this, and it is really great to develop dynamic web interfaces (in fsharp).