This style of reactive programming is quite popular in JavaScript UI frameworks these days under the moniker “signals”, with a proposal for standardization here: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-signals#-javascript-signals...

It’s used by frameworks Vue, SolidJS, Svelte, Ember, Angular, and there’s a few different implementations for React like Mobx and Jotai. There’s a few different algorithms for how to propagate changes and evaluate the DAG, I believe SolidJS2 uses a height-based algorithm similar to Incremental.

I’ve been fooling around with an implementation that uses an Int32Array arena to allocate nodes and link them together with linked lists without paying O(dependency edges) GC load: https://github.com/justjake/dalien-signals/tree/dalien-signa...

There are a few of these for Rust as well, Leptos is an example in UI frameworks, and Salsa is an example in general incremental computing, used in rust-analyzer.

Another way to look at this sort of thing is as a build system with automatically tracked dependencies. One such build system is tup, which instruments build jobs to detect what files they read to establish dependency relationships. Interesting reading from the author: https://gittup.org/tup/build_system_rules_and_algorithms.pdf, see also the classic Build Systems à la Carte https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Incremental – A library for incremental computations