Software Engineering Daily · Thursday, September 10, 2026
Joe Hellerstein, now at AWS, is working on Hydro, a Rust framework designed to simplify distributed programming by applying database concepts. He draws parallels to how declarative queries in databases abstract away infrastructure complexity, aiming to achieve similar portability and ease for general-purpose programming.
“This raises a natural question of why general purpose distributed programming can't feel the same way.”
“He is now at AWS where he works to bring his research into production through Hydro, which is a Rust framework to bring declarative queries to general purpose distributed programming.”
“So, I've been wrestling with that gap between declarative queries and imperative programming during the course of my career and trying to narrow, narrow, narrow that gap until we can really talk about programming the cloud, all the computers in the world, if you will, in a way that's portable, just the way we write queries, they're portable.”