ARarxanas·Nov 6, 2025
It's quite possible that I have different, smaller-scale problems than you have! So my feedback might not be as relevant
I wrote detailed commentary here: https://github.com/s-arash/ascent/discussions/72
Re Rust bindings and your specific comment:
- Deploying Soufflé and doing FFI is much more difficult for me in practice, just in terms of the overhead to set up a working build. (I'm not going to be able to justify setting up a Soufflé ruleset for Bazel, and then adding Rust-Soufflé binding generation, etc. at my workplace.)
- User-defined functors, or integrating normal data structures/functions/libraries into your Soufflé program, seems painful. If you're doing integrations with random existing systems, then reducing the friction here is essential. (In slide 16 of the talk, you can see how I embedded a constructive `Trace` type and a `G
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lobSet` into an actual Ascent value+lattice.)
- On the other hand, you might need Soufflé's component system for structuring larger programs whereas I might not (see above GitHub discussion).
Non-specifically:
- Several features like generative clauses, user-defined aggregations, lattices, etc. seem convenient in practice.
- I had worse performance with Soufflé than Ascent for my program for some query-planning reason that I couldn't figure out. I don't really know why; see https://github.com/souffle-lang/souffle/discussions/2557