How do you acquire the fundamental computer skills to hack on a complex systems project like OCaml? What’s missing and how do you go about bridging the gap? There are many fundamental systems skills t…

Can we have OCaml notebooks as pure client-side code? Can these notebooks have rich editor support (highlighting, formatting, types on hover, autocompletion, inline diagnostics, etc.)? Can you take pa…

In the last post, we looked at uniqueness mode and how uniqueness may be used to optimise. As we will see, uniqueness alone is insufficient in practice, and we also need a concept of linearity for uni…

Jane Street has been developing modal types for OCaml – an extension to the type system where modes track properties of values, such as their scope, thread sharing, and aliasing. These modes restrict…

Recently, I posted on X and LinkedIn that I am always looking for excellent people to join my group. I received a lot of enquiries, some of which led to internship hires (yay!). But mostly, I seemed t…

Off-CPU analysis is where the program behavior when it is not running is recorded and analysed. See Brendan Gregg’s eBPF based off-CPU analysis. While on-CPU performance monitoring tools such as perf…

A number of folks who regularly use OCaml were surprised to learn that you can reasonably debug OCaml programs using gdb. The aim of the post is to show the first steps in using gdb on OCaml programs.…

Last semester at IIT Madras, I taught a revamped core course CS3100 Paradigms of Programming, which introduces 3rd-year students to functional and logic programming paradigms. While the course had bee…

Multiple Research Software Engineer positions are available in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras to develop Multicore OCaml and enable Te…

Multicore OCaml comes with a concurrent garbage collector, where the garbage collector and the mutator threads run concurrently. Debugging concurrent GC bugs has been the most frustrating / satisfying…

I am chairing the PC for ML family workshop this year. The PC is happy to invite submissions for the workshop to be held during the ICFP conference week on Thursday 22nd August 2019. ML family worksho…

It has been 3 months since I joined IIT Madras and it has been good fun so far. Along with the members of the RISE group, we’ve initiated a project to build secure applications on top of secure extens…

Over the past few weeks, at OCaml Labs, we’ve deployed continuous benchmarking infrastructure for Multicore OCaml. Live results are available at http://ocamllabs.io/multicore. Continuous benchmarking…

Andrej Bauer and I are editing a special issue of JFP on the theory and practice of algebraic effects and handlers. The CfP is below. CALL FOR PAPERS JFP Special Issue on The Theory and Practice of…

.annotslide{display:none} I recently gave a talk on the internals of multicore OCaml GC at Jane Street offices in NYC. The slides from the talk are available online. But I felt that the slides alone…

We recently published a paper on concurrent system programming with effect handlers. In this paper, we show that with the help of effect handlers, we could express in direct-style, various interaction…

One of the key indicators of maturity of a language ecosystem is the ease of building, managing and publishing software packages in that language. OCaml platform has made steady progress in the last f…

Ezirmin is an easy interface over the Irmin, a library database for building persistent mergeable data structures based on the principles of Git. In this post, I will primarily discuss the Ezirmin lib…

Behavioural types such as session types, contracts and choreography describe the behaviour of a software entity as a sequence of operations on a resource such as a communication channel, web service s…

Efficient concurrent programming libraries are essential for taking advantage of fine-grained parallelism on multicore hardware. In this post, I will introduce reagents, a composable, lock-free concur…