pchiusano

Use Unison Share, it's great for all that!

https://share.unison-lang.org/

It's open source, you can create a free account with GitHub OAuth, and you can push projects there and collaborate on them, open PRs, publish releases, etc. It's very quick to pick up if you're already familiar with GitHub.

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

Thanks for this report.

The tooling takes a little getting used to but it’s extremely powerful. Here are a few benefits you’ll see -

UCM keeps a perfect incremental compilation cache as part of its codebase format, so you’re generally never waiting for code to build. When you pull from remote, there’s nothing to build either.

Pure tests are automatically cached rather than being run over and over.

Switching branches is instantaneous and doesn’t require recompiling.

Renaming is instantaneous, doesn’t break downstream usages, and doesn’t generate a huge text diff.

All code (and code diffs) are hyperlinked when rendered, supporting click through to definition.

I don’t know if you saw these getting started guides, they might be helpful -

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/quickstart/

And then this tour -

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/tour/

You can come by the Discord (https://unison-lang.org/discord) if you have any questions as you’re getting going! I hope you will give it a shot and sorry for the trouble getting started. There are a lot of new ideas in Unison and it’s been tricky to find the best way to get folks up to speed.

The Unison website and docs are all open source btw -

https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/website

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

Thanks!

I am not 100% sure the origin of the idea but I do remember being influenced by git and Nix. Basically "what if we took git but gave individual definitions a hash, rather than whole working trees?" Then later I learned that Joe Armstrong had thought about the same thing - I met Joe and talked with him about Unison a while back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46050943

Independent of the distributed systems stuff, I think it's a good idea. For instance, one can imagine build tools and a language-agnostic version of Unison Share that use this per-definition hashing idea to achieve perfect incremental compilation and hyperlinked code, instant find usages, search by type, etc. It feels like every language could benefit from this.

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

You can gradually adopt Unison, it's not all or nothing. It's true that when programming in Unison, you use Unison's tooling (which is seriously one of the best things about it), but there are lightweight ways of integrating with existing systems and services and that is definitely the intent.

We ourselves make use of this sort of thing since (for instance) Unison Cloud is implemented mostly in Unison but uses Haskell for a few things.

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46051750 (you can use Unison like any other open source general-purpose language)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46051939 (you can integrate Unison's tooling with git)

There can be enormous value in creating multiple pieces of tech all designed to work really well together. We've done that for Unison where it made sense while also keeping an eye on ease of integration with other tech.

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

Mobile or browser clients talk to a Unison backend services over HTTP, similar to any other language. Nothing fancy there.[1]

> sending code over the network to be executed elsewhere feels like a security risk to me?

I left out many details in my explanation and was just describing the core code syncing capability the language gives you. You can take a look at [2] to see what the core language primitives are - you can serialize values and code, ask their dependencies, deserialize them, and load them dynamically.

To turn that into a more industrial strength distributed computing platform, there are more pieces to it. For instance, you don't want to accept computations from anyone on the internet, only people who are authenticated. And you want sandboxing that lets you restrict the set of operations that dynamically loaded computations can use.

Within an app backend / deployed service, it is very useful to be able to fork computations onto other nodes and have that just work. But you likely won't directly expose this capability to the outside world, you instead expose services with a more limited API and which can only be used in safe ways.

[1] Though we might support Unison compiling to the browser and there have already been efforts in that direction - https://share.unison-lang.org/@dfreeman/warp This would allow a Unison front end and back end to talk very seamlessly, without manual serialization or networking

[2] https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/base/code/releases/7.4...

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

That depends. What are you wanting to accomplish more broadly with the integration?

I'll mention a couple things that might be relevant - you could have the git repo reference a branch or an immutable namespace hash on Unison Share. And as part of your git repo's CI, pull the Unison code and compile and/or deploy it or whatever you need to do.

There's support for webhooks on Unison Share as well, so you can do things like "open a PR to bump the dependency on the git repo whenever a new commit is pushed to branch XYZ on Unison Share".

Basically, with webhooks on GH and/or Unison Share and a bit of scripting you can set up whatever workflow you want.

Feel free to come by the Discord https://unison-lang.org/discord if you're wanting to try out Unison but not sure how best to integrate with an existing git repo.

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

Unison code is published on https://share.unison-lang.org/ which is itself open source (it's a Haskell + postgres app), as is the language and its tooling. You can use Unison like any other open source general-purpose language, and many people do that. (We ourselves did this when building Unison Cloud - we wrote Unison code and deployed that within containers running in AWS.)

The cloud product is totally separate and optional.

Maybe we'll have a page or a reference somewhere to make the lines more clear.

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

We do have an FFI now! https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/pull/6008

It's very recent and we'll be adding more types to it soon, this first PR was just focused on the core machinery. This is in the 1.0 release, btw.

Let us know if you give it a whirl.

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

Yes, we have a way of hashing literally all values in the language, including arbitrary data types, functions, continuations, etc. For instance, here, I'm hashing a lambda function:[1]

    > crypto.hash Sha3_256 (x -> x + 1)
    ⧩
    0xs704e9cc41e9aa0beb70432cff0038753d07ebb7f5b4de236a7a0a53eec3fdbb5

The test result cache is basically keyed by the hash of the expression, and then the test result itself (passed or failed, with text detail).

We only do this caching for pure tests (which are deterministic and don't need to be re-run over and over), enforced by the type system. You can have regular I/O tests as well, and these are run every time. Projects typically have a mix of both kinds of tests.

It is true that you can only hash things which are "closed" / have no free variables. You might instead hash a function which takes its free variables as parameters.

Overall I think Unison would be a nice implementation language for really anything that needs to make interesting use of hashing, since it's just there and always available.

[1]: https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/base/code/releases/7.4... [2]: https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/base/code/releases/7.4...

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

Erlang is great and was one inspiration for Unison. And a long time ago, I got a chance to show Joe Armstrong an early version of Unison. He liked the idea and was very encouraging. I remember that meant a lot to me at the time since he's a hero of mine. He had actually had the same idea of identifying individual functions via hashes and had pondered if a future version of Erlang could make use of that. We had a fun chat and he told me many old war stories from the early days of Erlang. I was really grateful for that. RIP, Joe.

Re: distributed computing, the main thing that the content-adressed code buys you is the ability to move computations around at runtime, deploying any missing dependencies on the fly. I can send you the expression `factorial 4` and what I'm actually sending is a bytecode tree with a hash of the factorial function. You then look this up in your local code cache - if you already have it, then you're good to go, if not, you ask me to send the code for that hash and I send it and you cache it for next time.

The upshot of this is that you can have programs that just transparently deploy themselves as they execute across a cluster of machines, with no setup needed in advance. This is a really powerful building block for creating distributed systems.

In Erlang, you can send a message to a remote actor, but it's not really advisable to send a message that is or contains a function since you don't know if the recipient has that function's implementation. Of course, you can set up an Erlang cluster so everyone has the same implementation (analogous to setting up a Spark cluster to have the same version of all dependencies everywhere), but this involves setup in advance and it can get pretty fragile as you start thinking about how these dependencies will evolve over time.

A lot of Erlang's ideas around fault tolerance carry over to Unison as well, though they play out differently due to differences in the core language and libraries.

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/ might be a good starting point!

For interesting usage - we built Unison Cloud (a distributed computing platform) with the Unison language and also more recently an "AWS Kinesis over object storage" product. It's nice for distributed systems, though you can also use it like any other general-purpose language, of course.

In terms of core language features, the effect system / algebraic effects implementation is something you may not have seen before. A lot of languages have special cases of this (like for async I/O, say, or generators), but algebraic effects are the uber-feature that can express all of these and more.

pchiusano

8 ay öncediscuss

Also, hi, I'm one of the language creators, feel free to ask any questions here!

pchiusano

10 ay öncediscuss

The Unison language supports algebraic effects and optimizes handlers that call their continuation at most once in tail position (we call these "affine"), so you can have the best of both worlds. Some links at the end if you're curious.

Here are a few places where "multi-resumable" stacks are still useful, even outside of nondeterminism:

* For instance, in a workflow engine a la Temporal, a `sleep` primitive might serialize and store the continuation in a distributed priority queue. The workarounds of not having access to the continuation are all not nearly as good.

* A pure interpreter of a structured concurrency ability is quite useful for testing, since it can test different interleavings of threads and produce tests that fail or pass deterministically. For Unison Cloud's distributed programming API, we have an (in-progress) chaos monkey interpreter that you can use for local testing of distributed systems.

* You can implement a simple debugger... as a library. It lets you set breakpoints and go forwards and backwards in time. Here's an example: https://share.unison-lang.org/@pchiusano/stepwise

Basically, any time you want to stash and do something interesting with the continuation, even if you only end up ultimately using it once, you still need the more general form of algebraic effects.

And then there are various nondeterminism effects that do call the continuation more than once. I'd say these are somewhat niche, but when you need them, you need them, and the code comes out much nicer. I especially like it for testing. You generally want tests to just be the logic, not a bunch of looping code or map/flatMap.

Some links:

* https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pchiusano_dan-doel-has-been-d... has some details on the optimization we do in Unison

* https://dolio.unison-services.cloud/s/blog/posts/optimizing-... is Dan's blog post on optimizing affine handlers

* https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pchiusano_kestrel-is-a-higher... is a typed query DSL that uses nondeterminism in an interesting way. For a declarative query DSL, it's nice to avoid explicit looping, similar to what SQL does.

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Unison 1.0

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