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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…

Octopus – a directed acyclic graph for app development launched on December 14, 2023 with 84 votes, #666 of 3,780 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was not reachable when checked in September 2026.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 18% of December 2023

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…

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