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Evolving the OCaml programming language

Approved
Session Description

OCaml is a 25+ year old, industrial-strength functional programming language used widely in the industry and academia. OCaml is particularly favoured for its ability to write correct and efficient programs easily. Notable open-source projects using OCaml include the Rocq theorem prover, MirageOS Unikernel libraries, and static analysis tools and programming languages such as Hack, Flow, Infer, CompCert, etc. Some notable industrial users include Jane Street, Meta, Ahrefs and Docker.

Despite its age, OCaml community is strong and growing, bringing cutting edge programming language research and language tooling to its users without breaking critical legacy code. In this talk, I will present how the OCaml community approaches this difficult task, reflecting upon the development of the recent major release OCaml 5 which brought native support for concurrency and parallelism to the language and developing state-of-the-art platform tools to help our users be effective at using OCaml.

Key Takeaways

The key takeaways from the talk are:

  • How OCaml language evolves with large features.

  • The tools and practices that ensure that the new features don't break existing programs.

  • Where the OCaml ecosystem falls behind when compared to other language ecosystems.

    • What we, the OCaml community, are doing to fix this.

    • Where you can contribute to this effort!

References

https://ocaml.org

Session Categories

Story of a FOSS project - from inception to growth
Introducing a FOSS project or a new version of a popular project
Community
Which track are you applying for?
Main track

Speakers

KC Sivaramakrishnan
Facuty/CTO | IIT Madras/Tarides

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the Chief Technology Officer of Tarides. I am interested in building robust, secure and scalable systems using programming language technology. I led the development of Multicore OCaml, a concurrent and parallel extension of the OCaml programming language. Multicore OCaml is now merged into OCaml, and is available for general use in OCaml 5.0. Effect handlers introduced as part of the concurrency story of Multicore OCaml has had influence on the design of React Hooks and WebAssembly stack switching.

https://x.com/kc_srk
KC Sivaramakrishnan

Reviews

Having this talk would be useful as we can get to know how the language evolved with the needs, and how it evolved while maintaining legacy code.

Reviewer #1 Approved

I think this talk would be really helpful - even for those who are not familiar with OCaml specifically. Maintaining a project + offering backwards compatibility for all its users is critical - but also extremely difficult.

Reviewer #2 Approved

OCaml is a great functional language, and its good to see this talk bring some exposure to it to the community.

Reviewer #3 Approved

Is not this better suited to the Programming Languages DevRoom?

Reviewer #4 Not Sure

I love OCaml. Plenty of scope for contributions!

Reviewer #5 Approved