Ask HN: Immutable data structures for the back end?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11979652

by uptownhr • 10 years ago

3 7 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Immutable data structures are being adopted on the frontend with frameworks like redux. Can this same concept be applied to the server? An express like framework that works with immutable state?

uptownhr• 10 years ago

Are there any examples of this being done?

galistoca• 10 years ago

What do you think would be the benefit?

hakanderyal• 10 years ago

You can check out Datomic[0], a database built on immutability, championed by Rick Hickey of Clojure.

[0] http://www.datomic.com/

bbcbasic• 10 years ago

Well it is trite to say it but Haskell has many examples of servers and idiomatic haskell will almost always use immutable data. Examples are web frameworks like Yesod and web servers like Warp.

I'm working on a toy stock exchange app to learn haskell and of course it will be mostly immutable. It will use some shared global state. This will have mutable reference using mvars or transactional memory but the "objects" themselves will be immutable.

Communicating between threads makes total immutability hard (maybe impossible?) unless you have a very clever threading model.

arms• 10 years ago

Sure they can. You can use server side languages like Clojure, Erlang, Elixir, F# and a few others I'm sure I'm missing.

There also exist libraries for some languages that introduce immutable data structures, like pysistance for Python.

gary__• 10 years ago

See the event sourcing pattern for an example of immutability at the backend.

http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn589792.aspx

_RPM• 10 years ago

Did you just learn about the concept of Immutable? It's a very simple concept, it seems to be the buzzword lately, especially with JavaScript libraries.

Ask HN: Immutable data structures for the back end?

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