I have been following Unison for a veeery long time. Ever since those blog posts on Paul's personal website. It has been more than 10 years already so this is a great milestone. But I am just a bit disappointed. I love programming languages. I follow every programming language, even some you probably have never heard of. I have witnessed the rise of Rust, Go, Zig and others. At the age and level of polish that Unison has I have seen far more traction for those languages that actually have become something. I personally believe the reason is how hard they are trying to push their impossible "business model" by making most of the things going on on the ecosystem locked in to their cloud. I know there is a BYOC oferring but that isn't enough. The vibes are just off for me.
When it comes to the comparison with other languages like Zig, Rust and Go, I disagree. I think it's because it hits its """new weird thing""" budget really quickly with Abilities and code in a database.
The Share project is open source, in contrast to GitHub, which is also popular despite having forms of locked-inness in practice as well.
I'm saying this not to negate the vibes you feel, but I'd rather people try it out and maybe see how their favorite language could benefit from different design decisions.
I think they have other issues, for example, they have no FFI. I think focusing on the business is actually a pretty decent idea. Trying to make money will force them to focus on things that are important to users and not get distracted bike-shedding on things that I would if I were them (like typeclasses).
Agreed. I want to build things that collaborate locally if the internet goes away. It seems like the hash-addressed function thing would be a pretty nice way to do that: no name resolution needed, just talk in terms of hashes to whoever's in range.
But all of the resources available for learning the language are funneling me towards using cloud hosted infra that won't be available if the internet goes away. For all I know there is a Unison-y way forward for my idea, but the path is obscured by a layer of marketing haze.
Yeah, the core ideas sound great, but if the only way code can be published and imported is via their cloud platform, that would be a hard pass for me.
Glancing at their docs, I see mentions of Unison Share, which is also hosted on unison-lang.org.
So I would appreciate this being clarified upfront in all their marketing and documentation.
Ah, I do see the BYOC option you mention. It still requires a unison.cloud account and an active subscription, though...
I for one am glad there is a commercial angle to the project. Done right, it means more hours could go into making things better, in a sustainable way. Also, having paying users provides a strong incentive to keep the technology grounded / practical.
Without the commercial stuff, Unison would be just another esolang to me. Now I'm probably going to play with it in upcoming side projects.
Hi. I don't know if you'll see this (I'm banned, so someone will have to upvote me if you have showdead off), but I would like to know what languages you personally like the most, or which ideas do you think a perfect language should have?
I've been following Unison for a long time, congrats on the release!
Unison is among the first languages to ship algebraic effects (aka Abilities [1]) as a major feature. In early talks and blog posts, as I recall, you were still a bit unsure about how it would land. So how did it turn out? Are you happy with how effects interact with the rest of the language? Do you like the syntax? Can you share any interesting details about how it's implemented under the hood?
What is the data you actually store when caching a successful test run? Do you store the hash of the expression which is the test, and a value with a semantics of "passed". Or do you have a way to hash all values (not expressions/AST!) that Unison can produce?
I am asking because if you also have a way to cache all values, this might allow to carry some of Unison's nice properties a little further. Say I implement a compiler in Unison, I end up with an expression that has a free variable, which carries the source code of the program I am compiling.
Now, I could take the hash of the expression, the hash of the term that represents the source code, i.e., what the variable in my compiler binds to, and the hash of the output. Would be very neat for reproducibility, similar to content-addressed derivations in Nix, and extensible to distributed reproducibility like Trustix.
I guess you'll be inclined to say that this is out of scope for your caching, because your caching would only cache results of expressions where all variables are bound (at the top level, evaluating down). And you would be right. But the point is to bridge to the outside of Unison, at runtime, and make this just easy to do with Unison.
Feel free to just point me at material to read, I am completely new to this language and it might be obvious to you...
Really cool project. To be honest, I think I don't fully understand the concept of a content addressed language. Initially I thought this was another BEAM language, but it seems to run on its own VM. How does Unison compare to BEAM languages when it comes to fault tolerance? What do you think is a use case that Unison shines that Erlang maybe falls short?
I'm curious about how the persistence primitives (OrderedTable, Table, etc) are implemented under the hood. Is it calling out to some other database service? Is it implemented in Unison itself? Seems like a really interesting composable set of primitives, together with the Database abstraction, but having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around it!
Congrats on 1.0! I've been interested in Unison for a while now, since I saw it pop up years ago.
As an Elixir/Erlang programmer, the thing that caught my eye about it was how it seemed to really actually be exploring some high level ideas Joe Armstrong had talked about. I'm thinking of, I think, [0] and [1], around essentially a content-addressable functions. Was he at all an influence on the language, or was it kind of an independent discovery of the same ideas?
Hi there, and congrats on the launch. I've been following the project from the sidelines, as it has always seemed interesting.
Since everything in software engineering has tradeoffs, I have to ask: what are Unison's?
I've read about the potential benefits of its distributed approach, but surely there must be drawbacks that are worth considering. Does pulling these micro-dependencies or hashing every block of code introduce latency at runtime? Are there caching concerns w.r.t. staleness, invalidation, poisoning, etc.? I'm imagining different scenarios, and maybe these specific ones are not a concern, but I'd appreciate an honest answer about ones that are.
To what Unison is actually compiled to and how is it ran? Gemini LLM says it compiles down to Scheme with is then ran Chez Scheme, how much of an LLM hallucination is that?
I know how fraught performance/micro-benchmarks are. But do you have any data on how performant it is? Should someone expect it to perform similar to Haskell?
Unison is one of the most exciting programming languages to me, and I'm a huge programming language nerd. A language with algebraic effects like Unison's really needs to hit the mainstream, as imo it's "the next big thing" after parametric polymorphism and algebraic data types. And Unison has a bunch of other cool ideas to go with it too.
This isn't really what they're going for, but I think it can potentially be a very interesting language for writing game mods in. One thing about game mods is that you want to run untrusted code that someone else wrote in your client, but you don't want to let just anyone easily hack your users. Unison seems well-designed for this use case because it seems like you could easily run untrusted Unison code without worrying about it escaping its sandbox due to the ability system. (Although this obviously requires that you typecheck the code before running it. And I don't know if Unison does that, but maybe it does.) There are other ways of implementing a sandbox, and Wasm is fairly well suited for this as well. But Unison seems like another interesting point in the design space.
Still on the subject of Game Dev, I also think that the ability system might be actually very cool for writing an ECS. For those who don't know, an ECS basically involves "entities" which have certain "components" on them, and then "systems" can run and access or modify the components on various entities. For performance, it can be very nice to be able to run different systems on different threads simultaneously. But to do this safely, you need to check that they're not going to try to access the same components. This limits current ECS implementations, because the user has to tediously tell the system scheduler what components each system is going to access. But Unison seems to have some kind of versatile system for inferring what abilities are needed by a given function. If it could do that, then accessing a component could be a an ability. So a function implementing a system that accesses 10 components would have 10 abilities. If those 10 abilities could be inferred, it would be a huge game changer for how nice it is to use an ECS.
> Unison seems well-designed for this use case because it seems like you could easily run untrusted Unison code without worrying about it escaping its sandbox due to the ability system. (Although this obviously requires that you typecheck the code before running it. And I don't know if Unison does that, but maybe it does.)
Indeed we do, and we use this for our Unison Cloud project [1]. With unison cloud we are inviting users to ship code to our Cloud for us to execute, so we built primitives in the language for scanning a code blob and making sure it doesn't do IO [2]. In Unison Cloud, you cannot use the IO ability directly, so you can't, for example, read files off our filesystem. We instead give you access to very specific abilities to do IO that we can safely handly. So for example, there is a `Http` ability you can call in Cloud to make web requests, but we can make sure you aren't hitting anything you shouldn't
I'm also excited about using this specifically for games. I've been thinking about how you could make a game in unison cloud and another user could contribute to the game by implementing an ability as a native service, which just becomes a native function call at runtime. I started working on an ECS [3] a while back, but I haven't had a chance to do much with it yet.
Oh man, I first looked at this project what feels like _forever_ ago and remember thinking--almost verbatim, "Wow I wish I could see this 5 years from now", and lo and behold I suppose it has been about that long!
Congratulations on the milestone. You are making one of the most radical PLs out there into something that is actually useable in an industry setting - that’s no mean feat.
I genuinely think systems like Unison are "the future of computing"...
But the question is when that future will be.
Part of the beauty of these sorts of systems is just that the context of what your system actually does is in one system, you aren't dealing with infra, data, and multi-service layers
Maybe that means it is a much better foundation for AI coding agents to work in? Or maybe AI slows it down? we continue to try and throw more code at the problem instead of re-examining the intermediate layers of abstraction?
I really don't know, but I do really want to learn more about is how the unison team is getting this out in the market. I do think that projects like this are best done outside of a VC backed model... but you do eventually need something sustainable, so curious how the team things about it. Transparently, I would love to work on a big bet like this... but it is hard to know if I could have it make financial sense.
With all that, a huge congrats to the team. This is a truly long-term effort and I love that.
I would love to see some benchmarks of unison somewhere on their website. I find knowing there performance characteristics helps a lot with understanding the use cases for a new language.
Even just a really rough "here our requests per second compared to Django, express.js and asp.net"
Would be great to get a rough read on where it sits among other choices for web stuff.
More generally, I do hope this goes well for unison, the ideas being explored are certainly fascinating.
I just hope it one day gets a runtime/target that's more applicable to non web stuff. I find it much easier to justify using a weird language for a little CLI tool then for a large web project.
That's still the case in Unison! This particular post doesn't dive into the codebase format, but the core idea is the same: Unison hashes your code by its AST and stores it in a database.
So, there are a whole bunch of interesting ideas here, but…
It’s a huge, all-or-nothing proposition. You have to adopt the language, the source control, and figure out the hosting of it, all at once. If you don’t like one thing in the whole stack, you’re stuck. So, I suspect all those interesting ideas will not go anywhere (at least directly; maybe they get incorporated elsewhere).
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.
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.
While I'm sure the creators would love to see their work become commercially successful and widespread, I don't think that a very interesting criteria to judge what's essentially cool computer science research.
Same, but I knew there was a v2 as I remember upgrading but I thought this was bringing it back. Oh well, fond memories of the web back in the early 2000s when I was just getting started doing web design, coding for fun back in my highschool days.
I remember the day Rúnar told me he was going to work on this new language called Unison.
I have always thought it was an amazing project to set out on, and was paving the way for a new kind of paradigm. Super proud to see them release a 1.0 and I would love to say Unison is my go-to language in the near future!
If you ever need this kind of stuff, you'll be better off building your own distributed interface by using plain regular GHC Haskell and https://haskell-distributed.github.io/
`haskell-distributed` is awesome, but the reason Unison is a new language is exactly to avoid the limitations of such frameworks, namely that they _can't_ send arbitrary code and data around like Unison can.
You should totally write up a tutorial demoing the development of the same application using each. Folks would love that.
The tool you use to interact with the code database keeps track of the changes in an append-only log - if you're familiar with git, the commands for tracking changes echo those of git (push, pull, merge, etc) and many of them integrate with git tooling.
Ok I tried it out. So I run ucm.cmd and it tells me: "I created a new codebase for you at C:\Users\myuser" but there is nothing there except a .unison folder. I didn't look too closely at first but maybe this all works by storing the code in the sqlite file inside that folder? Dot folders aren't usually relevant for project files. Because then even after the cli had me create a new project called happy-porcupine which is pretty unique on my computer I can't find any file or folder anywhere with that name on my machine. So then the getting started guide for unison tells me to create a scratch.u file and put the hello world instructions in there. But where am I supposed to put that scratch.u file? Ok so in desperation I put it right next to the ucm.cmd and just do "run helloWorld" on the cli even though I don't see why this would work but it does. Apparently I'm supposed to just dump my code directly into the downloaded compiler/folder? So then what is the C:\Users\myuser project folder for if I have to put all my .u files directly next to ucm.cmd anyway? And another weird thing is that everytime I make a change to the scratch.u file the cli tells me "Run `update` to apply these changes to your codebase." but even if I don't do that then rerunning "run helloWorld" still runs the new code.
I tried the unison vscode extension btw and despite ucm being on the path now it says: "Unison: Language server failed to connect, is there a UCM running? (version M4a or later)". I also seem to be required to close my ucm cli in order to run vscode because it says that the database is locked otherwise. And I guess there is no debugger yet? It just seems weird that I don't really know where my "project" even is or what this project model conceptually is. It seems like I just put all my unison code somewhere next to the compiler, it loads everything by default into the compiler and I merely do db updates into some kind of more permanent sqlite storage perhaps but then why do I even do that, wouldn't I still just put the .u files into a git repository? There is also no mention of how this language runtime works or performs, I'm assuming fully memory managed but perhaps slow because I'm seeing an interpreter mentioned?
I think you also really need a web based playground where you show off some of these benefits of unison in small self contained snippets because just reading through some examples is pretty hard, it's a very different language and I can't tell what I'm looking at as a lifelong C/Java/etc. tier programmer. Sure you explain the concepts but I'm looking for a far more hands on: "run this ability code, look: here is why this is cool because you are prevented from making mistakes thanks to ..." or "this cannot possibly error because thanks to abilities ..." instead of so much conceptual explanation: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/usin...
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 -
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 -
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.
Oh, so this is not the bidirectional file synchronization tool huh? Name collisions are inevitable, but unison (the sync tool) has been around and in use since 1998, so this one feels especially egregious.
proglangenjoyer|3 months ago
sp33der89|3 months ago
The Share project is open source, in contrast to GitHub, which is also popular despite having forms of locked-inness in practice as well.
I'm saying this not to negate the vibes you feel, but I'd rather people try it out and maybe see how their favorite language could benefit from different design decisions.
ChadNauseam|3 months ago
__MatrixMan__|3 months ago
But all of the resources available for learning the language are funneling me towards using cloud hosted infra that won't be available if the internet goes away. For all I know there is a Unison-y way forward for my idea, but the path is obscured by a layer of marketing haze.
imiric|3 months ago
Glancing at their docs, I see mentions of Unison Share, which is also hosted on unison-lang.org.
So I would appreciate this being clarified upfront in all their marketing and documentation.
Ah, I do see the BYOC option you mention. It still requires a unison.cloud account and an active subscription, though...
wofo|3 months ago
Without the commercial stuff, Unison would be just another esolang to me. Now I'm probably going to play with it in upcoming side projects.
aryairani|3 months ago
What would be enough?
paxcoder|3 months ago
pchiusano|3 months ago
infogulch|3 months ago
Unison is among the first languages to ship algebraic effects (aka Abilities [1]) as a major feature. In early talks and blog posts, as I recall, you were still a bit unsure about how it would land. So how did it turn out? Are you happy with how effects interact with the rest of the language? Do you like the syntax? Can you share any interesting details about how it's implemented under the hood?
[1]: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/
lorenzleutgeb|3 months ago
I am asking because if you also have a way to cache all values, this might allow to carry some of Unison's nice properties a little further. Say I implement a compiler in Unison, I end up with an expression that has a free variable, which carries the source code of the program I am compiling.
Now, I could take the hash of the expression, the hash of the term that represents the source code, i.e., what the variable in my compiler binds to, and the hash of the output. Would be very neat for reproducibility, similar to content-addressed derivations in Nix, and extensible to distributed reproducibility like Trustix.
I guess you'll be inclined to say that this is out of scope for your caching, because your caching would only cache results of expressions where all variables are bound (at the top level, evaluating down). And you would be right. But the point is to bridge to the outside of Unison, at runtime, and make this just easy to do with Unison.
Feel free to just point me at material to read, I am completely new to this language and it might be obvious to you...
SJMG|3 months ago
Unison has many intriguing features, the foremost being hashed definitions. It's an incredible paradigm shift.
It does seem like a solution searching for a problem right now though.
Who is this language targeted at and who is using it in production besides Unison Cloud?
SwiftyBug|3 months ago
jpereira|3 months ago
losvedir|3 months ago
As an Elixir/Erlang programmer, the thing that caught my eye about it was how it seemed to really actually be exploring some high level ideas Joe Armstrong had talked about. I'm thinking of, I think, [0] and [1], around essentially a content-addressable functions. Was he at all an influence on the language, or was it kind of an independent discovery of the same ideas?
[0] https://groups.google.com/g/erlang-programming/c/LKLesmrss2k...
[1] https://joearms.github.io/published/2015-03-12-The_web_of_na...
imiric|3 months ago
Since everything in software engineering has tradeoffs, I have to ask: what are Unison's?
I've read about the potential benefits of its distributed approach, but surely there must be drawbacks that are worth considering. Does pulling these micro-dependencies or hashing every block of code introduce latency at runtime? Are there caching concerns w.r.t. staleness, invalidation, poisoning, etc.? I'm imagining different scenarios, and maybe these specific ones are not a concern, but I'd appreciate an honest answer about ones that are.
littlestymaar|3 months ago
Then, a pretty basic question: I see that Unison has a quite radical design, but what problem does this design solves actually?
arturaz|3 months ago
Edit: I found https://www.unison-lang.org/blog/jit-announce/
pushingice|3 months ago
wonger_|3 months ago
rssoconnor|3 months ago
Edit: I mean structurally identical types that are meant to be distinct. As I recall Modula 3 used a BRANDED keyword for this.
taliesinb|3 months ago
ChadNauseam|3 months ago
This isn't really what they're going for, but I think it can potentially be a very interesting language for writing game mods in. One thing about game mods is that you want to run untrusted code that someone else wrote in your client, but you don't want to let just anyone easily hack your users. Unison seems well-designed for this use case because it seems like you could easily run untrusted Unison code without worrying about it escaping its sandbox due to the ability system. (Although this obviously requires that you typecheck the code before running it. And I don't know if Unison does that, but maybe it does.) There are other ways of implementing a sandbox, and Wasm is fairly well suited for this as well. But Unison seems like another interesting point in the design space.
Still on the subject of Game Dev, I also think that the ability system might be actually very cool for writing an ECS. For those who don't know, an ECS basically involves "entities" which have certain "components" on them, and then "systems" can run and access or modify the components on various entities. For performance, it can be very nice to be able to run different systems on different threads simultaneously. But to do this safely, you need to check that they're not going to try to access the same components. This limits current ECS implementations, because the user has to tediously tell the system scheduler what components each system is going to access. But Unison seems to have some kind of versatile system for inferring what abilities are needed by a given function. If it could do that, then accessing a component could be a an ability. So a function implementing a system that accesses 10 components would have 10 abilities. If those 10 abilities could be inferred, it would be a huge game changer for how nice it is to use an ECS.
stewoconnor|3 months ago
Indeed we do, and we use this for our Unison Cloud project [1]. With unison cloud we are inviting users to ship code to our Cloud for us to execute, so we built primitives in the language for scanning a code blob and making sure it doesn't do IO [2]. In Unison Cloud, you cannot use the IO ability directly, so you can't, for example, read files off our filesystem. We instead give you access to very specific abilities to do IO that we can safely handly. So for example, there is a `Http` ability you can call in Cloud to make web requests, but we can make sure you aren't hitting anything you shouldn't
I'm also excited about using this specifically for games. I've been thinking about how you could make a game in unison cloud and another user could contribute to the game by implementing an ability as a native service, which just becomes a native function call at runtime. I started working on an ECS [3] a while back, but I haven't had a chance to do much with it yet.
[1] https://unison.cloud [2] https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/base/code/releases/7.4... [3] https://share.unison-lang.org/@stew/ecs
0_gravitas|3 months ago
Very happy to see it finally hit 1.0
gampleman|3 months ago
addisonj|3 months ago
But the question is when that future will be.
Part of the beauty of these sorts of systems is just that the context of what your system actually does is in one system, you aren't dealing with infra, data, and multi-service layers
Maybe that means it is a much better foundation for AI coding agents to work in? Or maybe AI slows it down? we continue to try and throw more code at the problem instead of re-examining the intermediate layers of abstraction?
I really don't know, but I do really want to learn more about is how the unison team is getting this out in the market. I do think that projects like this are best done outside of a VC backed model... but you do eventually need something sustainable, so curious how the team things about it. Transparently, I would love to work on a big bet like this... but it is hard to know if I could have it make financial sense.
With all that, a huge congrats to the team. This is a truly long-term effort and I love that.
faldor20|3 months ago
Even just a really rough "here our requests per second compared to Django, express.js and asp.net" Would be great to get a rough read on where it sits among other choices for web stuff.
More generally, I do hope this goes well for unison, the ideas being explored are certainly fascinating.
I just hope it one day gets a runtime/target that's more applicable to non web stuff. I find it much easier to justify using a weird language for a little CLI tool then for a large web project.
epolanski|3 months ago
But I don't see any references to it anymore.
rlmark|3 months ago
drob518|3 months ago
It’s a huge, all-or-nothing proposition. You have to adopt the language, the source control, and figure out the hosting of it, all at once. If you don’t like one thing in the whole stack, you’re stuck. So, I suspect all those interesting ideas will not go anywhere (at least directly; maybe they get incorporated elsewhere).
pchiusano|3 months ago
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.
indolering|3 months ago
jonym|3 months ago
vanc_cefepime|3 months ago
ofrzeta|3 months ago
perrohunter|3 months ago
vinnyhaps|3 months ago
I have always thought it was an amazing project to set out on, and was paving the way for a new kind of paradigm. Super proud to see them release a 1.0 and I would love to say Unison is my go-to language in the near future!
teleforce|3 months ago
[1] A look at Unison: a revolutionary programming language:
https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/unison-revolution.html
instig007|3 months ago
aryairani|3 months ago
You should totally write up a tutorial demoing the development of the same application using each. Folks would love that.
IshKebab|3 months ago
jarbus|3 months ago
domlebo70|3 months ago
phplovesong|3 months ago
aryairani|3 months ago
rlmark|3 months ago
The projects in a codebase can absolutely be shared and versioned as well. Here's a log of release artifacts from a library as an example: https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/base/releases.
Nathanba|3 months ago
I tried the unison vscode extension btw and despite ucm being on the path now it says: "Unison: Language server failed to connect, is there a UCM running? (version M4a or later)". I also seem to be required to close my ucm cli in order to run vscode because it says that the database is locked otherwise. And I guess there is no debugger yet? It just seems weird that I don't really know where my "project" even is or what this project model conceptually is. It seems like I just put all my unison code somewhere next to the compiler, it loads everything by default into the compiler and I merely do db updates into some kind of more permanent sqlite storage perhaps but then why do I even do that, wouldn't I still just put the .u files into a git repository? There is also no mention of how this language runtime works or performs, I'm assuming fully memory managed but perhaps slow because I'm seeing an interpreter mentioned?
I think you also really need a web based playground where you show off some of these benefits of unison in small self contained snippets because just reading through some examples is pretty hard, it's a very different language and I can't tell what I'm looking at as a lifelong C/Java/etc. tier programmer. Sure you explain the concepts but I'm looking for a far more hands on: "run this ability code, look: here is why this is cool because you are prevented from making mistakes thanks to ..." or "this cannot possibly error because thanks to abilities ..." instead of so much conceptual explanation: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/usin...
pchiusano|3 months ago
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
rlmark|3 months ago
eej71|3 months ago
https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison
shauniel|3 months ago
pchiusano|3 months ago
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.
panic|3 months ago
jimis|3 months ago
[deleted]
LeoPanthera|3 months ago
notfed|3 months ago