I’ve been curious about it, but it’s difficult to wrap my mind around. I’ve read a lot of frank mcsherry’s blog posts, watched his videos, been through the book, and I guess it just hasn’t clicked for me! I also don’t have any use cases that make sense as a hobby project, and abstractly I know it could be useful at work but I can’t evangelize something I don’t really understand.
Rust took me around three attempts to get into, and it took a motivated project to really seal the deal, but at some point I understood enough that it just became programming again. Haven’t reached that with differential dataflow yet, but I’ll keep trying.
in case you're interested, we're a loose group working on DDlog [0] and DDflow to be able to use them for a JS/TS linter [1].
There are a couple fairly concrete and varyingly-isolated tasks on Timely [2], DDlog, as well as DDflow's dogs^3 [3](for the latter, boilerplate-encapsulating tooling with documentation for WCOJ [4]).
Let me know if you'd like to talk.
Rust took me around three attempts to get into, and it took a motivated project to really seal the deal, but at some point I understood enough that it just became programming again. Haven’t reached that with differential dataflow yet, but I’ll keep trying.