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by azeirah
485 days ago
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Do interaction nets have any interesting properties that make them useful for distributed computing? Think IoT, edge computing, embedded, that kind of thing? And synchronization primitives? I wanted to also say I loved reading the documentation. Your idea of places, spaces and values feels like a waaay more intuitive naming scheme for than what's common in CS. The time-travel example also felt oddly intuitive to me. I don't really care that it uses black magic underneath, it's quite elegant! |
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Of course, the intrinsic parallelism is useful there (especially since it is emergent from the structure of the program, rather than needing to be explicitly written). In terms of other interesting properties: interaction nets don't rely on linear memory, instead being based on a graph, which can naturally be chunked and distributed across machines, with synchronization only being necessary when wires span different chunks.
> And synchronization primitives?
The initial answer to this question is: interaction nets don't need synchronization primitives, as all parallelism is emergent from the net structure.
Now, in practice, one may want some additional synchronization-esque primitives. For example, a parallel shortcircuiting or is not expressible in vanilla interaction nets (as all computation is deterministic, and such an operation isn't deterministic). There are extensions to interaction nets for non-determinism, that allow some of these use-cases, which start to look more like synchronization primitives. Vine doesn't support any of these at the moment, but it may in the future.
> I wanted to also say I loved reading the documentation. Your idea of places, spaces and values feels like a waaay more intuitive naming scheme for than what's common in CS.
I'm glad to hear it! I spend a lot of time trying to come up with good names for things, so it's nice to know that that pays off. Though I suppose it's not too hard to improve on the status quo, when it's 'lvalue'/'rvalue', lol. (I did, however, steal 'place' and 'value' from Rust.)
> The time-travel example also felt oddly intuitive to me. I don't really care that it uses black magic underneath, it's quite elegant!
Yeah, the 'time-travel' stuff sounds wacky, but I do think it can be really intuitive if one is willing to accept it. I wrote a really cool algorithm a little while ago that really uses this 'time-travel' idea; I [wrote about it](https://discord.com/channels/1246152587883970662/12461564508...) on Discord. (I should really type that up into a blog post of sorts.