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The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming

unison-lang.org

31–40 of 116 posts

Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming

#32

Nil nove sub sole ? It reeks of COOLs (Concurrent Object Oriented Languages). Here's an example of the mid 90s: https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/projects/CORRELATE/

Perhaps not, but plenty of good ideas kick around for years or decades before someone finally figures out how to put them together right.

Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming

#34

This project hashing of sourcecode (or AST) in the interpreter is a really powerful idea I plan to use it for a slightly different purpose. I want to implement an interpreter that is multithreaded similar to Java or Erlang that can send objects between shared memory without marshalling or copying. I had a talk with someone on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907523 about python's Global Interpreter Lock and…

Iirc pony langs messages could work like that.

Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming

#35
post #28
post #11

Earlier 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.

Well, there is a relationship. The relationship is specifically that Unison nodes can communicate code with one another unambiguously by exchanging hashes.

Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming

#37
This strikes me as a compiler and IDE feature, rather than a reason to have a separate programming language.

What does having a separate language give us as opposed to taking say, Kotlin, and having a compiler that stores the AST/whatever in a database and does all the interesting goodies?

Or is that the end goal, but we're using a basic language to test it out and work out all the quirks before writing a compiler for existing languages?

Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming

#39

>Other tools try to recover structure from text; Unison stores code in a database Just like VisualAge in the last century. Sign me up, that was great stuff.

I loved it, except that it seemed to periodically corrupt the source code database which was an absolute nightmare.

Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming

#40
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, there is a relationship. The relationship is specifically that Unison nodes can communicate code with one another unambiguously by exchanging hashes.

Would this not work just as well with a lisp or even JS?
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