3 ms·

I’m curious how incremental updates fit into this? I guess there are relatively structured possible updates like adding a row but one can imagine unstructured u

I’m curious how incremental updates fit into this? I guess there are relatively structured possible updates like adding a row but one can imagine unstructured updates like updating some parameter that many formulas depend on or (not sure how much causal allows this) much more varied structures/dependencies such that one update may require calculating some small but hard to predict subset of cells. Maybe there’s no need if you can recalculate everything fast. I’m also interested in how causal fits into the taxonomy here: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/an-opinionated-map-of-incremental-and-streaming-systems/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/an-opinionated-ma...

dsagal 4y ago
That's what I wonder about too. I imagine that a slow calculation would be fine if done once when the data is first loaded into the system. Once the results are in memory, any new data should only affect smallish subsets of cells. This is the approach our product Grist (https://www.getgrist.com https://www.getgrist.com) takes for its calculation engine. Keeping track of dependencies slows it down for the initial load, but beyond that, it only needs to calculate what's needed, so most updates are fast. Even though the engine literally evaluates user-defined Python code for every cell.