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Has anyone seen discussion of the impact of serverless on programming-language design? It relaxes constraints that have historically restricted the shape of vi
by mncharity 8y ago
Has anyone seen discussion of the impact of serverless on programming-language design?
It relaxes constraints that have historically restricted the shape of viable languages. With massively-parallel deterministic compilation (like Stanford's gg - which just got simpler to implement). Parallel distributed incremental shared type checking, like Facebook's Hack. Language-community-wide sharing of compilation artifacts (sort-of like build images, or typescript's type definition repos, or Coq's proof repo).
"That would be a nice language feature, but we don't know how to compile it efficiently, so you can't have it" has been a crippling refrain for decades. "[D]on't know how to either parallelize or centrally cache it" is a much lower bar. At least for open source.
This involves not just compiler tech in isolation, but also community organization for fine-grain code sharing. Any suggestions on things to look at?