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I have been following Unison for a veeery long time. Ever since those blog posts on Paul's personal website. It has been more than 10 years already so this is a

I have been following Unison for a veeery long time. Ever since those blog posts on Paul's personal website. It has been more than 10 years already so this is a great milestone. But I am just a bit disappointed. I love programming languages. I follow every programming language, even some you probably have never heard of. I have witnessed the rise of Rust, Go, Zig and others. At the age and level of polish that Unison has I have seen far more traction for those languages that actually have become something. I personally believe the reason is how hard they are trying to push their impossible "business model" by making most of the things going on on the ecosystem locked in to their cloud. I know there is a BYOC oferring but that isn't enough. The vibes are just off for me.

ChadNauseam 10mo ago
I think they have other issues, for example, they have no FFI. I think focusing on the business is actually a pretty decent idea. Trying to make money will force them to focus on things that are important to users and not get distracted bike-shedding on things that I would if I were them (like typeclasses).
- pchiusano 10mo ago
  We do have an FFI now! https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/pull/6008 https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/pull/6008 It's very recent and we'll be adding more types to it soon, this first PR was just focused on the core machinery. This is in the 1.0 release, btw. Let us know if you give it a whirl.
imiric 10mo ago
Yeah, the core ideas sound great, but if the only way code can be published and imported is via their cloud platform, that would be a hard pass for me. Glancing at their docs, I see mentions of Unison Share, which is also hosted on unison-lang.org. So I would appreciate this being clarified upfront in all their marketing and documentation. Ah, I do see the BYOC option you mention. It still requires a unison.cloud account and an active subscription, though...
- pchiusano 10mo ago
  Unison code is published on https://share.unison-lang.org/ https://share.unison-lang.org/ which is itself open source (it's a Haskell + postgres app), as is the language and its tooling. You can use Unison like any other open source general-purpose language, and many people do that. (We ourselves did this when building Unison Cloud - we wrote Unison code and deployed that within containers running in AWS.) The cloud product is totally separate and optional. Maybe we'll have a page or a reference somewhere to make the lines more clear.
  - imiric 10mo ago
    I see, thanks. It's reassuring to know that I can use all language features without relying on any of your infrastructure.
    - stewoconnor 10mo ago
      yeah, unison cloud is like the "heroku for functions" if you wanna not think about how deployments work. But you can just run unison programs standalone or in a docker container or whatever: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/docker/ https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/docker/
  - digdugdirk 10mo ago
    Is a standalone Unison Code instance something that could be deployed in a docker container for personal use?
    - stewoconnor 10mo ago
      https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/docker/ https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/docker/
sp33der89 10mo ago
When it comes to the comparison with other languages like Zig, Rust and Go, I disagree. I think it's because it hits its """new weird thing""" budget really quickly with Abilities and code in a database. The Share project is open source, in contrast to GitHub, which is also popular despite having forms of locked-inness in practice as well. I'm saying this not to negate the vibes you feel, but I'd rather people try it out and maybe see how their favorite language could benefit from different design decisions.
paxcoder 10mo ago
Hi. I don't know if you'll see this (I'm banned, so someone will have to upvote me if you have showdead off), but I would like to know what languages you personally like the most, or which ideas do you think a perfect language should have?
wofo 10mo ago
I for one am glad there is a commercial angle to the project. Done right, it means more hours could go into making things better, in a sustainable way. Also, having paying users provides a strong incentive to keep the technology grounded / practical. Without the commercial stuff, Unison would be just another esolang to me. Now I'm probably going to play with it in upcoming side projects.
__MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
Agreed. I want to build things that collaborate locally if the internet goes away. It seems like the hash-addressed function thing would be a pretty nice way to do that: no name resolution needed, just talk in terms of hashes to whoever's in range. But all of the resources available for learning the language are funneling me towards using cloud hosted infra that won't be available if the internet goes away. For all I know there is a Unison-y way forward for my idea, but the path is obscured by a layer of marketing haze.
aryairani 10mo ago
Is anything locked into Unison Cloud, which is also free for unlimited services? What would be enough?

ChadNauseam 10mo ago

I think they have other issues, for example, they have no FFI. I think focusing on the business is actually a pretty decent idea. Trying to make money will force them to focus on things that are important to users and not get distracted bike-shedding on things that I would if I were them (like typeclasses).

pchiusano 10mo ago
We do have an FFI now! https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/pull/6008 https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/pull/6008 It's very recent and we'll be adding more types to it soon, this first PR was just focused on the core machinery. This is in the 1.0 release, btw. Let us know if you give it a whirl.

imiric 10mo ago

Yeah, the core ideas sound great, but if the only way code can be published and imported is via their cloud platform, that would be a hard pass for me. Glancing at their docs, I see mentions of Unison Share, which is also hosted on unison-lang.org. So I would appreciate this being clarified upfront in all their marketing and documentation. Ah, I do see the BYOC option you mention. It still requires a unison.cloud account and an active subscription, though...

pchiusano 10mo ago
Unison code is published on https://share.unison-lang.org/ https://share.unison-lang.org/ which is itself open source (it's a Haskell + postgres app), as is the language and its tooling. You can use Unison like any other open source general-purpose language, and many people do that. (We ourselves did this when building Unison Cloud - we wrote Unison code and deployed that within containers running in AWS.) The cloud product is totally separate and optional. Maybe we'll have a page or a reference somewhere to make the lines more clear.
- imiric 10mo ago
  I see, thanks. It's reassuring to know that I can use all language features without relying on any of your infrastructure.
  - stewoconnor 10mo ago
    yeah, unison cloud is like the "heroku for functions" if you wanna not think about how deployments work. But you can just run unison programs standalone or in a docker container or whatever: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/docker/ https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/docker/
- digdugdirk 10mo ago
  Is a standalone Unison Code instance something that could be deployed in a docker container for personal use?
  - stewoconnor 10mo ago
    https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/docker/ https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/docker/

sp33der89 10mo ago

When it comes to the comparison with other languages like Zig, Rust and Go, I disagree. I think it's because it hits its """new weird thing""" budget really quickly with Abilities and code in a database. The Share project is open source, in contrast to GitHub, which is also popular despite having forms of locked-inness in practice as well. I'm saying this not to negate the vibes you feel, but I'd rather people try it out and maybe see how their favorite language could benefit from different design decisions.

paxcoder 10mo ago

Hi. I don't know if you'll see this (I'm banned, so someone will have to upvote me if you have showdead off), but I would like to know what languages you personally like the most, or which ideas do you think a perfect language should have?

wofo 10mo ago

I for one am glad there is a commercial angle to the project. Done right, it means more hours could go into making things better, in a sustainable way. Also, having paying users provides a strong incentive to keep the technology grounded / practical. Without the commercial stuff, Unison would be just another esolang to me. Now I'm probably going to play with it in upcoming side projects.

__MatrixMan__ 10mo ago

Agreed. I want to build things that collaborate locally if the internet goes away. It seems like the hash-addressed function thing would be a pretty nice way to do that: no name resolution needed, just talk in terms of hashes to whoever's in range. But all of the resources available for learning the language are funneling me towards using cloud hosted infra that won't be available if the internet goes away. For all I know there is a Unison-y way forward for my idea, but the path is obscured by a layer of marketing haze.

aryairani 10mo ago

Is anything locked into Unison Cloud, which is also free for unlimited services? What would be enough?