OCaml in
Teaching & Research
With its deep mathematical roots, OCaml has has always had strong ties to academia. It is taught in universities around the world, and has accrued an ever growing body of research.
Top Universities Teach OCaml
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a collegiate research university in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Lecture Notes
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. higher education academy.
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York.
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego(UC San Diego or, colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California.
Lecture Notes
Exercises
Université Paris Cité
Université Paris Cité is a multidisciplinary research university in Paris, France, known for its strong emphasis on innovation, international collaboration, and a broad range of academic programs across sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
Lecture Notes
Lecture Notes
Lecture Notes
Many more academic institutions teach OCaml!
Research Papers
Understand the theoretical foundations of the OCaml programming language and compiler
Retrofitting Effect Handlers Onto OCaml
Effect handlers have been gathering momentum as a mechanism for modular programming with user-defined effects. Effect handlers allow for non-local control flow mechanisms such as generators, async/await, lightweight threads, and coroutines to be composably expressed. We present a design and evaluate a full-fledged efficient implementation of effect handlers for OCaml, an industrial-strength multi-paradigm programming language. Our implementation strives to maintain the backwards compatibility and performance profile of existing OCaml code. Retrofitting effect handlers onto OCaml is challenging since OCaml does not currently have any non-local control flow mechanisms other than exceptions. Our implementation of effect handlers for OCaml: (i) imposes a mean 1% overhead on a comprehensive macro benchmark suite that does not use effect handlers; (ii) remains compatible with program analysis tools that inspect the stack; and (iii) is efficient for new code that makes use of effect handlers.
K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, Stephen Dolan, Leo White, Tom Kelly, Sadiq Jaffer, Anil Madhavapeddy
Extending OCaml's `open`
We propose a harmonious extension of OCaml's `open` construct. OCaml's existing construct `open M` imports the names exported by the module `M` into the current scope. At present `M` is required to be the path to a module. We propose extending `open` to instead accept an arbitrary module expression, making it possible to succinctly address a number of existing scope-related difficulties that arise when writing OCaml programs.
Runhang Li, Jeremy Yallop
Bounding Data Races in Space and Time
We propose a new semantics for shared-memory parallel programs that gives strong guarantees even in the presence of data races. Our local data race freedom property guar- antees that all data-race-free portions of programs exhibit sequential semantics. We provide a straightforward oper- ational semantics and an equivalent axiomatic model, and evaluate an implementation for the OCaml programming language. Our evaluation demonstrates that it is possible to balance a comprehensible memory model with a reasonable (no overhead on x86, ~0.6% on ARM) sequential performance trade-off in a mainstream programming language
Stephen Dolan, KC Sivaramakrishnan, Anil Madhavapeddy
Recommended Books
OCaml Programming: Correct + Efficient + Beautiful
This textbook, used in a third-semester Cornell course, teaches functional programming and data structures in OCaml, emphasizing semantics and software engineering. Suitable for students with Python and Java backgrounds, it requires some imperative language skills and basic discrete mathematics. The book includes over 200 YouTube videos as supplementary or alternative learning resources.
Programming Well: Abstraction and Design In Computation
This textbook uses OCaml as the primary language to explore different programming paradigms - imperative, functional, and object-oriented. Through OCaml's multi-paradigm nature, readers learn to solve problems in different ways, considering aspects like correctness, efficiency, readability, and elegance. Suitable for those with basic programming experience, it builds on introductory concepts to examine the difference between programming and programming well.
View all books (17)
Industry
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