The OCaml Planet

I’ve been doing battle the last few days with Docker, and in particular trying to persuade BuildKit to do what I wanted. I find Docker leans towards being a deployment tool, rather than a development tool which is to say that it’s exceedingly useful for both, but when I encounter problems trying to persuade it to do what I’m after for development, it tends to feel I’m not using it for the purpose for which it was intended.

The OCaml Cookbook is open to new contributions! This post gives you an overview of the feature and how to add your own recipes.

Jane Street is an electronic trading firm that uses low latency trading systems built in OCaml to provide liquidity to financial markets worldwide. In December 2022, after nearly a decade of development, OCaml 5.0 was released with OCaml’s first multi-core capable runtime. This was an exciting milestone, finally making it possible to write shared-memory parallel programs in OCaml. The new runtime was designed to be easy to adopt: it didn’t disturb OCaml’s FFI, and performance was meant to be only a few percentage points slower in single-core mode. Despite those promising beginnings, switching to runtime-5 within Jane Street was harder than we expected. Indeed, we've only just switched to it this year, after 2.5 years of research and engineering effort. This talk will give an overview of the problems we ran into, and what we learned from the process, including some new ideas that solved some very old problems in the design of OCaml's GC. See other Tech Talks here: https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/index.html

Feedback on this post is welcomed on Discuss! We are extremely happy to announce the release of opam 2.4.0 and encourage all users to upgrade. Please read on for installation and upgrade instructions. Major changes On opam init the compiler chosen for the default switch will no longer be ocaml-syste...

When I started to play with OCaml I was kind of surprised that there was no id (identity) function that was available out-of-box (in Stdlib module, that’s auto-opened). A quick search lead me to the Fun module, which is part of the standard library and is nested under Stdlib. It was introduced in OCaml 4.08, alongside other modules such as Int, Result and Option.1 It was part of some broader efforts to slim down Stdlib and move in the direction of a more modular standard library. ↩

Today I’m going to cover a very basic topic - conversions between OCaml’s primary numeric types int and float. I guess most of you are wondering if such a basic topic deserves a special treatment, but if you read on I promise that it will be worth it.