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I'm the author of the research paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20314) and owner of that GitHub account.

Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069564


Awesome post, please make a Zig library!


Author here. Thanks for posting.

I spent several years' worth of weekends working on this, and I'm glad to see it here on Hacker News.

I started working on this problem when I learned about Lamping's algorithm for optimal lambda reduction [1]. He invented a beautiful algorithm (often referred to as his "abstract algorithm"), which uses fan-in and fan-out nodes to reduce lambda terms optimally (with optimal sharing). Unfortunately, in order to make it fully work, some fans needed to duplicate one another while others needed to cancel one another. To determine this correctly Lamping had to extend his abstract algorithm with several delimiter node types and many additional graph reduction rules. These delimiter nodes perform "bookkeeping", making sure the right fan nodes match. I was dissatisfied with the need for these additional nodes and rules. There had to be a better way.

My goal was to try to implement Lamping's abstract algorithm without adding any delimiter nodes, and to do it under the interaction net paradigm to ensure perfect confluence. I tried countless solutions, and finally Delta-Nets was born. Feel free to ask any questions.

I recently started building a programming language on top of Delta-Nets, called Pur (https://pur.dev/).

Feel free to follow along this journey:

https://x.com/danaugrs

https://x.com/purlanguage

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/96709.96711


Author here. Other experts in this field have also used the term "lambda reduction", including Levy himself [1] and Lamping [2], both which are referenced in the Delta-Nets paper. "Lambda-reduction" is clearly an abbreviation of Lambda-calculi reduction.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/143165.143172

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/96709.96711


Excellent article. I'm looking forward to Zig's upcoming async I/O.



Six weeks of six days (4 work days and 2 rest days) in a month would be better than four weeks of nine days (6 work days and 3 rest days) in my opinion.


Awesome! I'm a big fan of Keras and this is an exciting update.


Cool! Sounds a bit like the weekly founder meetings that https://www.startupschool.org/ had, which were a lot of fun and very helpful.



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