Indeed. I've experimented a bit with abusing DD/DBSP for my purposes by modeling various kinds of data structures in terms of Z-sets, but these efforts have not yielded very impressive results. :)
For how elegant DBSP is I still found the paper a tough nut to crack, and it really is one of the more accessible theoretical contributions in the space, at least from this grubby programmer's perspective... I hope to devote some time to study and play around more, but in the meantime I'm rooting for you!
Thanks again!
You may want to check out this tutorial for a hands-on introduction to DBSP: https://docs.rs/dbsp/0.28.0/dbsp/tutorial/index.html
Also there's now a DBSP implementation in pure Python! https://github.com/brurucy/pydbsp
The reason DBSP and Differential Dataflow work so well is because they are specialized to relational computations. Relational operators have nice properties that allow evaluating them incrementally. Incremental evaluation for a general purpose language like Rust is a much, much harder problem.
FWIW, DBSP is available as a Rust crate (https://crates.io/crates/dbsp), so you can use it as an embedded incremental compute engine inside your program.