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Unison Cloud

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Re: Unison Cloud

#51

Post by paxys »

borland wrote: post #31

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 point of the effort is the new language. Hosting and the rest are added on top of it. So yes, if you just want to host some code you shouldn't be rewriting all of it in Unison. But if you are already a user of the language then this is a good framework for you.

Re: Unison Cloud

#53

Post by rsync »

Unison friends: Is there an rclone handler/recipe extant, or in the works, that would facilitate inter-cloud data transfer ?

Asking for a friend ...

Re: Unison Cloud

#54

Post by seagreen »

parentheses wrote: post #37
borland wrote: post #31

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.

The odd thing is unison started purely as a language. Now there's a platform.

I often find the best way to understand complex things is to dig all the way back to when they were being thought up. In this case there's a blog post from 2017 that I still find useful when thinking about Unison:

https://pchiusano.github.io/2017-01-20/why-not-haskell.html

Key quote:

Composability is destroyed at program boundaries, therefore extend these boundaries outward, until all the computational resources of civilization are joined in a single planetary-scale computer

(With the open sourcing of the language I doubt it will be one computer anymore, but it's an interesting window into the original idea)

Personally I find there's a lot to this. It's interesting that we're really, really good at composing code within a program. I can map, filter, loop and do whatever I want to nested data structures with complete type safety to my heart's content. My editor's autocompleting, docs are showing up on hover, it's easy to test, all's well.

But as soon as I want cron involved, and maybe a little state-- this is all wrecked. Also deployment gets more annoying as they talk about a lot.

So I think Unison always had to have a platform to support bringing this stuff into the language, even though they built the language first.

I'd love to hear some opinions from outside Unison about how they like using this language, tooling and hosting.

I'd like to hear this too.

Also, it would be great if there was something like https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/ or https://todomvc.com/ for platforms that we could use to compare Unison, AWS, etc etc. Or is there already a 7GUIs for platforms that I don't know about?

Re: Unison Cloud

#55

Post by dmix »

pchiusano wrote: post #50
borland wrote: post #31

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…

It definitely is ambitious! A multi-year effort. This post https://www.unison.cloud/our-approach/ talks more about why such radical changes were necessary to achieve what we wanted. (In particular check out the "3 requirements of the dream" section, which walks through what the programming language needs to support to be able to do things like "deploy with a function call.") My general take on "when and where to inno…

So as an end user it's kind of like a more cohesive version of https://deno.com/ for infra, where you buy into a runtime + comes prepacked with DBs (k/v stores), scheduling, and deploy stuff?

> by storing Unison code in a database, keyed by the hash of that code, we gain a perfect incremental compilation cache which is shared among all developers of a project. This is an absolutely WILD feature, but it's fantastic and hard to go back once you've experienced it. I am basically never waiting around for my code to compile - once code has been parsed and typechecked once, by anyone, it's not touched again until it's changed.

Interesting. Whats it like upgrading and managing dependencies in that code? I'd assume it gets more complex when it's not just the Unison system but 3rd party plugins (stuff interacting with the OS or other libs).

Re: Unison Cloud

#56

Post by jweir »

borland wrote: post #31

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…

It is very experimental as well. An interesting language, but say good by to tried and true tooling since the code exists as records in database, not files.

This could lead some huge advantages, and new obstacles.

I played with the language for about a week and found it intriguing. And it seems to approach tackling Joe Armstrong's question "Why do we need modules at all?" -> https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/05876...

Re: Unison Cloud

#57

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

Here's some context for those who, like me, never heard about Unison before:

This service is apparently directed at developers using a programming language called Unison ― hence the name: Unison Cloud.

As I understand it, this is akin to launching a service called Python Cloud (by the PSF, as part of the language?) where Python developers can deploy their apps as a function call:

  # app.py

  class App:  
    def get(self, req):  
      name = req.GET.get("name")  
      return f"
hello {name}!
"

    def deploy(self):  
      from PyCloud import cloud  
      project = cloud.create_project(self)  
      project.deploy()  

  # main.py

  from .app import App

  app = App()  
  url = app.deploy()

Re: Unison Cloud

#60

Post by alephaleph »

stewoconnor wrote: post #24
suralind wrote: post #22

OK, maybe this is a silly question, but if a function that is written once always refer to the same hash as when it was written, how do you update functions? For example, if I have function A that calls function B, in today's languages updating function B would just work (A will call updated function). My understanding is that updated function B (we can call it B'), would not be used.

Unison developer here! Let's say you have some term: B = "Hello " and it hashes to #a3yx. Lets say you also have funcion: A = B ++ "world" which hashes to #c7c1 when we store the A function, we actually store it as: #c6c7 = #a3yx ++ "world" Then later if you update the definition of B: B = "Hello, " and that function hashes to, #5e2b, when you tell unison to update B from #a3yx => #5e2b, it will look for all of the p…

What happens if you have two terms that are incidentally equivalent:

  A = "Hello "
  B = "Hello "
  C = A ++ "world"
  D = B ++ "world"
and then you update the definition of A but not B?
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