Szymon Kaliski

Computational DAGs

• Makefile triggers updates only to changed files (by timestamp)

  main: main.o module1.o module2.o
      g++ main.o module1.o module2.o -o main
  

  To build the file main, I need to first make sure that targets main.o, module1.o and module2.o are up to date; then I need to call the following command...

  (...)

  To be "up to date" means that the last-modified time of [output file] is newer than any of its prerequisites' last-modified times

  — https://stackoverflow.com/a/4349717 ↗

• React redraws UI based on state change, recalculating only what changed

  • there's a tension between this approach, and immediate mode UI, where UI is drawn every frame, and there's no need to calculate diffs

Are there any incremental computation systems that treat inputs not as mutable cells, but model the whole system as a persistent data structure, and updates create a new, structure-sharing instance?

— https://twitter.com/MarijnJH/status/1191720489523318786 ↗

Backlinks

1. 2025-09-26VPLs and LLMs¹
2. 2025-09-25VPL¹
3. 2024-07-01Building a Static Site Generator²
4. 2023-05-20SDFSheets — A Spreadsheet of Signed Distance Functions¹
5. 2021-01-17DAG and Tree Representations of Code¹
6. 2020-12-13Connections are Usually Better than Taxonomies¹
7. 2020-07-14Protoboard — A Breadboard for Programming¹