Life & fun · December 14, 2023
Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development
Directed acyclic graphs are muched discussed in comp-sci, but octopus appears to be the first reusable, turnkey, ready-to-wear, off-the-shelf implementation of a DAG for application development, in any language, that I'm aware of. This is remarkable because DAGs hit a sweet spot in the middle of the three common programming paradigms (OO, event-driven, functional). Let's have a DAG as the top-level structure of our applications. Data-fetching and onChange handlers live in DAG nodes, next to the data they act on. The UI flows out from the DAG with fine-grained reactivity. Our app state is…
In plain words
Octopus is a directed acyclic graph framework for application development that structures apps around DAG nodes containing data, handlers, and UI logic. It combines aspects of object-oriented, event-driven, and functional programming paradigms. The framework automatically keeps application state consistent through graph traversal when user actions or API results occur, and simplifies UI components by having them reflect values directly from the graph. It is available as an open-source implementation on GitHub.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Directed acyclic graphs are muched discussed in comp-sci, but octopus appears to be the first reusable, turnkey, ready-to-wear, off-the-shelf implementation of a DAG for application development, in any language, that I'm aware of. This is remarkable because DAGs hit a sweet spot in the middle of the three common programming paradigms (OO, event-driven, functional). Let's have a DAG as the top-level structure of our applications. Data-fetching and onChange handlers live in DAG nodes, next to the data they act on. The UI flows out from the DAG with fine-grained reactivity. Our app state is effortlessly consistent, because any outside change (user action, api result) unleashes a graph traversal. Our UI components become much simpler, because they just need to dumbly reflect values in the graph. I'm putting this up for a second time. Absolutely no-one bit the first time, which can't be right :-)
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