[anoncept]

Martin’s writing and thinking has been hugely inspirational for me too — thanks for highlighting the automerge work here!

Next, regarding your other thoughts, two notes, one on performance and one on “common themes”.

Re performance: while in my initial comment I linked directly to McSherry & friends’ work on differential dataflow mostly because I value it as a principled and effective framework for incrementalizing many kinds of computation I care about, I would be remiss if I failed to also highlight here their complementary “COST” project of using this framework to demonstrate how carefully engineered (single-threaded!) implementations of graph computations in Rust can often considerably outperform more complex but more wasteful pre-existing approaches (at least in the database world).

(Whether the same flavor of result will also appear over time in the build systems or UI worlds seems like an interesting question for future work!)

Finally, re “common themes in incremental systems”: yes! - this and your point about “fundamental principles” are exactly what I was hoping to suggest by linking to the build systems + OT materials!

Thanks!

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf

https://github.com/frankmcsherry/COST