What does HackerNews think of differential-dataflow?

Some recent solutions to this problem include Differential Dataflow and Materialize. It would be neat if postgres adopted something similar for live-updating materialized views.

https://github.com/timelydataflow/differential-dataflow

https://materialize.com/

Sure! So first, being in C/asm/.. is not incompatible with what i say: i'm saying that some of these are not hand-written, but are generated. So off the top of my head:

- FFTW: an ocaml synthesizer for fft kernels from a fourier-transform DSL

- basically all SQL engines, in particular the "query planner" part, which compiles an SQL query (functional spec based on the theory of relational algebra) into an imperative program (eg https://sqlite.org/opcode.html)

- https://github.com/mit-plv/fiat-crypto, verified crypto routines

- https://www.flopoco.org/, float cores for fpga

- https://faust.grame.fr/, audio synthesis from a functional stream-based language

- tensorflow and other "static graph" neural-whatever-matrix-multiplication-libs (https://ocaml.xyz/tutorial/cgraph.html)

- https://github.com/timelydataflow/differential-dataflow, incremental dataflow computations

edit: i almost forgot all the openssl perl scripts, even if it can be seen more as macro-expansion than actual meta-programing/program synthesis: https://github.com/search?l=Perl&q=repo%3Aopenssl%2Fopenssl+... Basically all crypto libs use at least some form of compile-time execution to generate constants, offsets, tables, ..

edit2: also svelte, a "virtual virtual" dom js thingy, never looked much into it, but afaik they do compile-time diffing, and thus generate imperative code (ie ugly old-school efficient spaghetti) from react-like vdom code.

> Does materialize describe how they implement timely dataflow?

It's open source (https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/timely-dataflow), and also extensively written about both in academic research papers and documentation for the project itself. The GitHub repo has pointers to all of that. See also differential dataflow (https://github.com/timelydataflow/differential-dataflow).