Top all-time · #3847
Jared Forsyth
Personal blog · jaredforsyth.com/posts · on HN as jaredlyprogramming
Jared Forsyth writes JaredForsyth.com, a personal blog at jaredforsyth.com about programming. Since 2010, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “Type Inference That Sticks”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Jared Forsyth writes about Unison, ReasonML cross-platform projects and local-first software. HN readers link his Unison post as a summary of what is interesting about the language.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
My website
Most-linked posts?
- /posts/whats-cool-about-unison/3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-03-10
- Type Inference That Sticks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-02-04
- VeoLuz: Generative art toy that visualizes photon paths, built in rust+reasonml2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-10
- Flow Typing, a New Lens on Linearity2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-21
- In search of a Local first Database2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-22
What Hacker News says?
> Async isn't really the problem - the same issue pops up with error handling, with resource management There are ways to handle that, though. It's called algebraic effects and they are nicely implemented in Unison language[1] (although there they're called abilities[2]). It's very interesting language; I recommend reading [3] for good overview. [1] https://www.unisonweb.org/ [2] https://www.unisonweb.org/docs/abili…
Comment linking /posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
on “Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work”Submitted Making a cross-platform mobile game in Reason/OCaml as a story · 170 points
HN discussionUpdate: I'm skimming here ( https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/whats-cool-about-unison/ ) and here ( https://joshondesign.com/2012/04/09/open-letter-language-des... ) and I see Unison is serious about not having raw text source code as the ground truth. I'm intrigued but don't totally understand yet. I'm sure this analogy is technically incorrect but: This reminds me of Smalltalk and old Lisps on mainframes shared by ma…
Comment linking /posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
on “Unison Programming Language”Submitted A ReasonReact Tutorial as a story · 161 points
HN discussionThere is nice blog post summing up what's cool about Unison[1] [1] https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
Comment linking /posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
on “Unison Programming Language”Submitted What Holds Me Back from ClojureScript as a story · 107 points
HN discussionIt is also interestingly solved in Unison language (using "algebraic effects"), although it's just an early alpha version. See https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
Comment linking /posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
on “Zig, parser combinators, and why they're awesome”Submitted Evaluating GunJS as a local-first database as a story · 27 points
HN discussionThis is the nearest thing that I've come across in python: http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/ http://jaredforsyth.com/blog/2010/jun/17/clevercss-reloaded/
Comment linking /blog/2010/jun/17/clevercss-reloaded/
on “I can style a whole app with only four hex values and SASS.”Submitted Flow Typing, a New Lens on Linearity as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThere are definitely individuals exploring the native-compilation story, for instance bsb-native[0] allows BuckleScript to use OCaml's native compilation tools. Jared Forsyth has also been publishing a lot of material[1] about creating cross-platform project using ReasonML. The ReasonML team seem to be taking a conservative approach towards what they officially release. They want to make sure that they have a really…
Comment linking /
on “25 Days of ReasonML”Submitted VeoLuz: Generative art toy that visualizes photon paths, built in rust+reasonml as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAgreed. Colored functions can be solved, though. See Unison[1] or Zig[2]. [1] https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/whats-cool-about-unison/ [2] https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
Comment linking /posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
on “Rust’s async isn’t colored”Submitted When will ReasonML be ready? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI like the idea of editing AST directly instead of just plain text. JetBrains MPS[1] is an editor based on the same principle (but much more mature). Also, the Unison language stores its code only as AST, not text[2]. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ [2] https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/whats-cool-about-unison/#Code...
Comment linking /posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
on “Tylr: A tiny tile-based editor”Submitted Papers we love: flow typing, a new lens on linearity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI was interested to find some discussion of how the performance characteristics compare to PyPy/Unladen Swallow/RPython. Quick googling only found one comparison: http://jaredforsyth.com/blog/2010/jul/21/cpython-vs-pypy-vs-... The routines he benchmarked are simple string tokenizing, though, so I'm not really surprised the translated-to-C version came in so much faster.
Comment linking /blog/2010/jul/21/cpython-vs-pypy-vs-cython/
on “Using the Cython Compiler to write fast Python code”Submitted In search of a Local first Database as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's the steps to become highly informed in whatever technology: 1) Search through university course listings and youtube for introductory lectures on said subject and it's related subjects. Example, these basic design lectures, note all these lectures are open http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05863fall17/schedule.htm... or these Stanford iOS development lectures https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-io…
Comment linking /posts/making-a-cross-platform-mobile-game-in-reason-ocaml/
on “Ask HN: How to become an expert iOS developer? What are the steps?”Submitted A generative art tool visualizing the paths of photons, using rust+reasonml as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'll stray from the others and mention Unison Lang. It's a whole new everything but has yet to prove itself useful for production code. Its promises, if they pan out, could change how we design data-intensive applications. Its idea about code and data as content-addressable can help simplify some distributed workflows. https://www.unison-lang.org/ Great summary here: https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/whats-cool-about-u…
Comment linking /posts/whats-cool-about-unison/
on “Ask HN: Experienced devs, what language would you learn today?”Submitted Terraform: Generate 3-d models of geographic terrain as a story · 2 points
HN discussion- WA · 2022-12-05
Not sure about the "no one else has", but maybe you can connect with these people and have a look here and contribute your views to the offline-first movement: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/ https://medium.com/offline-camp/offline-first-resources-2acc... https://jaredforsyth.com/posts/in-search-of-a-local-first-da... https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html…
Comment linking /posts/in-search-of-a-local-first-database/
on “Is it worth writing about?” Submitted JSON parsing in Python as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Automate TypeScript Refactors with Dosido as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Practical Comparison of AI Coding Agents as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Type Inference That Sticks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Type Inference That Sticks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Deploying Native Reason/OCaml with Zeit's Now.sh as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Detecting unused styles in JavaScript with `babel-traverse` as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
