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Kind of wish there were more resources out there for incremental and query driven compilation, but I guess folks are still figuring that stuff out. Bit hard to write a textbook yet!

Im kind of a bit afraid of going too deep into building my backend before I can figure out how to incrementalise stuff... 😰

Move to an incremental/query driven architecture · Issue #103 · pikelet-lang/pikelet

Here is what I’ve collected so far - not sure if you have any more ideas?

github.com

Before we go too far down the path of building a traditional compiler (#9), it probably makes sense to start thinking about how we might incrementalise things. This will be super important for supp...

Graydon Hoare

@graydon_pub

GitHub - Adapton/fungi-lang.rust: Fungi: Typed incremental computation with names

some keywords: "incremental computation" (eg. github.com/Adapton/fungi-), "view maintenance" (eg. arxiv.org/pdf/1403.6968.), "differential dataflow" (eg. blog.acolyer.org/2015/06/17/dif), "build systems" (eg. microsoft.com/en-us/research), "reference attribute grammars" (lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/files/33120)

github.com

Fungi: Typed incremental computation with names. Contribute to Adapton/fungi-lang.rust development by creating an account on GitHub.

Wait. Has any of those techniques (beyond build systems) been demonstrated in compilers?

We incremental computation researchers cannot say it to get published, but the basic assumption for readers seems that these techniques aren’t really black boxes and writing any essentially new program with them is a new paper, unless your program is already well *parallelized*!

By that do you mean that it’s hard to transfer the techniques between programs? Or hard to get reliable performance improvements?

See other replies: it’s hard to get performance improvements. You can write highly parallel reusable primitives (such as folds that require associativity and whose computation tree is balanced, or many query languages ops), then use them for your program.

8:21 AM · Sep 12, 2018Twitter for iPhone

Let me admit I did a PhD on this and realized the issue halfway, so there might be a “disgruntled failed employee” vibe to this (and I haven’t studied the type systems to guide authors of incremental programs).

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Not to worry! I value the perspective!

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It’s just a potential cognitive bias warning :-) just like writing “Stock X sucks but BTW oh I shorted it so I’m biased!”

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Still pretty opaque from an outsider perspective though. Hard to know what direction to take to get me from a sequential scan over my ast, to something that can work as a language server/incremental compiler ☹️ - hard to know what to invest time in experimenting/learning.