Comment by zackmorris

This is nice, and obvious. I've waited about 20 years since I learned MATLAB and GNU Octave for someone to make a graph solver like this. And about 25 years since I first had the idea, when I was learning VLSI with VHDL in college and didn't see anything like the functional programming of circuits in what at the time was the imperative C++ world. The closest thing then was Lisp, but nobody talked about how the graph representation (intermediate code or i-code in the imperative world) could be solved in an auto-parallelized way.

We still see this today in how languages go out of their way to implement higher order method libraries (map/reduce/filter) but then under the hood there is no multithreading, they just expect the developer to annotate their loops to be parallel because the languages aren't formal enough to know about side effects in the innermost logic, and don't support immutability or performant pass-by-value semantics with copy-on-write anyway. So we end up with handwavy languages like Rust that put all of that mental load onto the developer for basically no gain, they just save memory by performing computation in-place imperatively.

I also like how Bend sidesteps the nonexistence of highly scaled symmetric multiprocessing CPUs by supporting GPUs. It makes the argument moot that GPUs can't be stopped because they're too big to fail. Julia is the only other language I've seen that tries this. I wish Clojure did, although it's been a long time since I followed it so maybe it has some parallelism?

I would have dearly loved to work on something like Bend, had someone solved the funding issue. Nobody wants to pay for pure research, and nobody sees the need for languages that do what everyone else is doing except easier. We have Kickstarter for widgets and Patreon for influencers, but makers have to bootstrap themselves or learn everything about finance or live in the right city or have a large network to hopefully meet an angel investor or work in academia and lose all rights to what they invent while spending the majority of their time hustling for grants anyway. So it just never happens and we're stuck with the same old busted techniques. Like how Hollywood only has money for sequels and reboots or the recording industry only has money for canned corporate music and hits from already famous artists and yet another cover that yanks the original better song off the radio.

A quarter of a century can go by in the blink of an eye if you get suckered into building other people's dreams as a people-pleaser. Be careful what you work on.