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frankmcsherry
differential-dataflow
Rust2015–2023
frankmcsherry / differential-dataflow

differential-dataflow

An implementation of differential dataflow using timely dataflow on Rust.

4Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
186GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An implementation of differential dataflow using timely dataflow on Rust.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-06-16 11:36:59 UTC to 2023-03-07 13:59:14 UTC.

01232015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110

What Hacker News says

8 sources
Lets you define queries over some data set declaratively, and instead of recomputing the query over the entire data set every time you want an updated answer, it uses Differential Dataflow <https://github.com/frankmcsherry/differential-dataflow> to efficiently(^1) calculate the new results by updating the results of the previous query execution in response to new updates to the data set. ^1: I'm not an expert on Differential Dataflow, so I don't know what "efficiently" means in this context, other than "should be faster than running the query from scratch."
In Differential Datalog: a programming language for incremental computation
No idea where this fits on the priority list, but I think a lot of problems around stream processing still aren't solved, and it's holding us back from a really productive programming paradigm. Handling updates/retractions elegantly is hard or impossible on many platforms, handling late (sometimes _extremely_ late) data can be very inefficient. Working with complex dependencies between events (beyond just time-based windows), in realtime, can be really tough. As the saying goes, cache invalidation is one of the hardest problems in software engineering. Having a simple platform to represent processing as a DAG, but fully supporting both short and long term changes transparently would make event sourcing architectures trivial and extremely productive. The closest we've come seems to be: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/differential-dataflow
Read the rest
Lots of very active CS research in this area though.
In Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
I don't want to speak for all of dataflow-dom, but the main differences that I see (and exploit) are that data-parallel dataflow languages isolate control flow into small independent regions, making the larger computation data-driven. This does mean things are eager rather than lazy, but it also makes things much easier to parallelize (because of the independence) and much easier to incrementalize.[0] [0]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/differential-dataflow
In An introduction to timely dataflow, part 2

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