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Comment by dna_polymerase | Hacker News Reader

Differential Dataflow is about differential computation which itself is a generalization of incremental computing, most commonly known from Excel.

A good introduction to the overall topic is incremental [0] an OCaml library by Jane Street and the corresponding blog posts and videos [1]. They even use it for webapps [2].

[0]: https://github.com/janestreet/incremental

[1]: https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/seven-implementations-... (Great to understand fundamentals of an incremental computation graph)

[2]: https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/intro-to-incr-dom/

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I think the underlying algorithms/architecture are pretty different. I believe Incremental is based on http://matthewhammer.org/icfp11/ChenDuHaAc2011-implicit-SAC.... and Differential Dataflow is based on the ideas in https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... .

interesting without me having to read both paper what would you say is the main differences? Pros and cons of each architectur?

"Incremental Computing" - A new term for me... I figured out how to do it a few days ago, after seeing this reference to MetaMine on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j94lgd/metamin...

In Metamine,

  = signifies Equation, a persistent assignment. Any update to the value on the  after which any change to the value results in all dependent values being recomputed.
  := signifies a standard one shot assignment.

The runtime behavior is easy enough to implement, less than 100 lines of Pascal. I worried that the code for a language that supported it would be unreadable, like FORTH, only worse. Imagine if Excel spreadsheets were plain text source code.

This should be the top comment, reading through those docs is a terrible experience, I think the author lacks any didactics experience

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