Want to help build the future of functional programming? The OCaml Language team at Jane Street is doing groundbreaking work on making OCaml a better language for high-performance programming, while preserving the ease-of-use that makes it great.
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The direction I'm most excited about is adding enough type-level control to support data-race free parallel programming. This is based on our work on modes, which you can get a taste of from this paper from the last ICFP:
We're also leveraging OCaml's support for user-defined schedulers to build schedulers for parallel and concurrent workloads that let programmers just expose all the parallelism they can find in their program at a very fine granularity, and have the scheduler just handle it all efficiently.
Plus, we're working on language features like unboxed types, that give programmers much better control over the shape of data, and parameterized libraries, that dramatically improve the ability to modularize your programs at large scale.
As we do this, we're also reshaping our core libraries to take advantage of all this new power in the language, so we can make these features easy to use in practice.
This is all very exciting. Will these improvements introduce a separate variant of OCaml with the goal of a merge to main in the future or is it taking place in the main branch already? I remember Jane Street having their version of the std lib or something like that.
In any case: thanks ! It ..
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https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/slindley/papers/mode-inference-draft-feb2024.pdf
It's pretty exciting stuff, but it's not all we're doing!
https://github.com/janestreet/opam-repository/tree/with-extensions
In any case: thanks ! It ..