Thanks!

I am not 100% sure the origin of the idea but I do remember being influenced by git and Nix. Basically "what if we took git but gave individual definitions a hash, rather than whole working trees?" Then later I learned that Joe Armstrong had thought about the same thing - I met Joe and talked with him about Unison a while back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46050943

Independent of the distributed systems stuff, I think it's a good idea. For instance, one can imagine build tools and a language-agnostic version of Unison Share that use this per-definition hashing idea to achieve perfect incremental compilation and hyperlinked code, instant find usages, search by type, etc. It feels like every language could benefit from this.