Jane Street/Yaron Minsky/at al came to similar conclusion with their formalized incremental implementation [0] - that this type of computation reappears in different contexts (build systems, ui, optimal data processing/display on large volumes of high frequency data etc). It's very interesting approach indeed.
May be of interest: I released a port of Incremental to Rust the other week. It has a bit of a way to go in polish and docs, but the core implementation and API should be very familiar. (To the extent that it uses GADTs for node kinds just like the OCaml!) It has Expert nodes so incremental-map is feasible and already works. I’ve been using it as the state management for some UI with much success. Credit to the authors because it’s a good design. https://github.com/cormacrelf/incremental-rs
I wonder if there is some wisdom in Rich Hickey's Transducers
There is also differential dataflow.
I feel all the ideas are related and could be combined.
What I want is a rich runtime and API that lets me fork/join, cancel, queue, schedule mutual exclusion (like a lock without a mutex), create dependency trees or graphs.
I am also reminded of dataflow programming and Esterel which a kind HN user pointed me towards for synchronous programming of signals.
[0] https://blog.janestreet.com/introducing-incremental