The OCaml Planet

A conversation with Laurent Mazare about how your choice of programming language interacts with the kind of work you do, and in particular about the tradeoffs between Python and OCaml when doing machine learning and data analysis. Ron and Laurent discuss the tradeoffs between working in a text editor and a Jupyter Notebook, the importance of visualization and interactivity, how tools and practices vary between language ecosystems, and how language features like borrow-checking in Rust and ref-counting in Swift and Python can make machine learning easier. You can find the transcript for this podcast episode along with links to things we discussed at signalsandthreads.com.

A conversation with Laurent Mazare about how your choice of programming language interacts with the kind of work you do, and in particular about the tradeoffs between Python and OCaml when doing machine learning and data analysis. Ron and Laurent discuss the tradeoffs between working in a text editor and a Jupyter Notebook, the importance of visualization and interactivity, how tools and practices vary between language ecosystems, and how language features like borrow-checking in Rust and ref-counting in Swift and Python can make machine learning easier. You can find the transcript for this podcast episode along with links to things we discussed at signalsandthreads.com.

The ever-widening availability of FPGAs has opened the door to solving a broad set of performance-critical problems in hardware. In this episode, Ron speaks with Andy Ray, who leads Jane Street’s hardware design team. Andy has a long career prior to Jane Street shipping hardware designs for things like modems and video codecs. That work led him to create Hardcaml, a domain-specific language for expressing hardware designs. Ron and Andy talk about the current state-of-the-art in hardware tooling, the economics of FPGAs, and how the process of designing hardware can be improved by applying lessons from software engineering. Hardcaml itself is open-source software available on Github, along with a collection of associated libraries and tools. Andy has also given a talk on Hardcaml called OCaml All The Way Down, and has a post on Jane Street's blog about some of the testing techniques used with Hardcaml. You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to related work at signalsandthreads.com.

The ever-widening availability of FPGAs has opened the door to solving a broad set of performance-critical problems in hardware. In this episode, Ron speaks with Andy Ray, who leads Jane Street’s hardware design team. Andy has a long career prior to Jane Street shipping hardware designs for things like modems and video codecs. That work led him to create Hardcaml, a domain-specific language for expressing hardware designs. Ron and Andy talk about the current state-of-the-art in hardware tooling, the economics of FPGAs, and how the process of designing hardware can be improved by applying lessons from software engineering. Hardcaml itself is open-source software available on Github, along with a collection of associated libraries and tools. Andy has also given a talk on Hardcaml called OCaml All The Way Down, and has a post on Jane Street's blog about some of the testing techniques used with Hardcaml. You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to related work at signalsandthreads.com.

In this talk, we present our work on a syntax definition for the OCaml language in the syntax definition formalism SDF3. SDF3 supports the high-level definition of concrete and abstract syntax through declarative disambiguation and definition of c...

Since their inception, state-machine frameworks have proven their worth by finding defects in everything from the underlying AUTOSAR components of Volvo cars to digital invoicing systems. These case studies were carried out with Erlang’s commercia...

AD-OCaml is a library framework for calculating mathematically exact derivatives and deep power series approximations of almost arbitrary OCaml programs via algorithmic differentiation. Unlike similar frameworks, this includes programs with side e...

In this talk we describe our experience in using an automatic API-migration strategy dedicated at changing the signatures of OCaml functions, using the Rotor refactoring tool for OCaml. We perform a case study on open source Jane Street libraries ...

Irmin is an OCaml library for building distributed databases with the same design principles as Git. Existing Git users will find many familiar features: branching/merging, immutable causal history for all changes, and the ability to restore to an...

OCaml programmers make deliberate use of abstract data types for composing safe and reliable software systems. The OCaml compiler relies on the invariants imposed by the type system to produce efficient and compact runtime data representations. Be...