Scale By the Bay 2018

Unison is a new open source language for building distributed systems. It starts with a premise that no matter the scale of a computation, no matter how many nodes it occupies, it should be expressible via a single program, not thousands of separate programs. A logical endpoint of this perspective is that there is only one computer, the global supercomputer, consisting of all the internet-connected compute nodes of civilization, and our programming languages should let us program this supercomputer simply and directly, even when describing computations that occupy thousands or millions of nodes! This talk introduces the Unison language, showing what it can be like to program systems of any size with this model of computing.