Disclosed herein are systems and methods for executing programs written in functional style. A distributed computing system receives a program that expresses computation upon one or more sets of distributed key-value pairs (DKVs) and one or more global variables (GVs). The system distributes an assembly that includes at least a compiled binary of the program to the nodes of a computing cluster, with different portions of the DKVs being stored across the plurality of nodes of the computing cluster. The system causes execution of the assembly by each of the plurality of nodes of the computing cluster, the ones of the plurality of nodes executing the assembly using the different portions of the one or more DKVs stored thereon.