Incremental – Library for incremental computations

opensource.janestreet.com

66 points·erwan··10 comments

verg related: check out Adapton: http://adapton.org/, specifically, the May 2017 video in the videos section.

There’s a comment in the initial Incremental blog post about it: https://blog.janestreet.com/introducing-incremental/?utm_sou...

Latest versions of Adapton are written in Rust by the way.

Yep! The video explains why at the end. These models are often very GC-unfriendly unless you know what you're going & have reasonably good hooks into the GC. Jane Street talks about this aspect here too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6a5G5i4gQU

The author just gave a talk at Strange Loop [0] that provides a better conceptual overview than the talk linked in the docs. Pretty interesting stuff.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xX37RGJKE

Discussed in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908044

The ideas in Incremental are really intriguing if you are trying to build high performance systems.

Here is a partial port to .NET, if anyone is interested:

https://github.com/isaksky/Incremental.NET

Thanks! What's missing from the port? Are you planning to continue working on it?

It is missing Signal.bind, which is a way to allow dynamic signal graphs (a pretty advanced feature). There is also work to be done in optimizing the order of re-computations. I'm not sure about further work yet, depends on if we end up using it at work.

Is anyone using it in production apart from Jane Street?

I doubt it. It was open-sourced a few months ago and take some time to wrap your head around, at least for me.

edit: In fact, it is much older than that as dang pointed out.

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