There's a tool in Rust called Salsa that's tailored for this, but it's galaxy-brained (I watched an hourlong introduction video and could still barely grasp it).
I'm not sure what the delta between Salsa and differential-dataflow is. My experience with differential-dataflow is that it's also galaxy brain.
[blog]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018...
[datafrog]: https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog
I can relate to that. What helped me to understand it though is looking through some projects using Salsa [1] and reading the document about how the Rust compiler uses queries [2]. You might also want to watch the discussion video with Anders Hejlsberg [3] that gives an overview of the problems that Adapton/Salsa try to solve.
[1] https://crates.io/crates/salsa/reverse_dependencies
[2] https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/query.html
[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/shows/seth-juarez/anders-h...