alt Hacker NewsI dream of applications that expose sufficient metadata about their outputs such that the OS can know if rerunning is necessary without me needing to specify.
Nixos does this for builds, but I've not seen it generalized to arbitrary processes.
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jchw • today at 4:46 PM
You can, in many cases, mangle other use cases into the Nix build system, to varying degrees of success, though there are plenty of complexities with that.
this is kind of the idea behind functional programming. A pure function is one whose output depends only on its input, and no other hidden state, so that let’s you just cache a lut of input -> output for anything you’ve computed before. The tricky thing is anything that reads/writes to memory/disk/network etc. is no longer a pure function and can’t be cached easily