devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development Rúnar Bjarnason - Unison
Dec 16, 2022
In this conversation, Rúnar Bjarnason, co-founder of Unison Computing and a pioneer in functional programming, delves into the revolutionary Unison programming language. He discusses how Unison's content-addressable approach streamlines software development by eliminating traditional build processes, thus enhancing productivity. Rúnar also highlights its innovative mechanisms for dependency management and error handling, paving the way for seamless asynchronous programming. This unique language promises to transform how developers tackle distributed systems.
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Code As Content-Addressed Data
- Unison treats code as immutable data and addresses every definition by a content hash instead of names.
- This gives each piece of code a unique, unambiguous global address and removes name-based ambiguity.
Hashes Ignore Names
- Unison computes hashes by removing names and hashing the syntax tree, so identical implementations share hashes regardless of naming.
- This increases reuse and reveals when independently written functions are actually identical.
Finding Duplicate Implementations
- Rúnar tried to add a utility function to the base library and discovered someone else had already written the same implementation.
- The content-addressed hash revealed the duplicate by matching the implementation despite different naming.