This year, Tarides attended the 2022 Functional Conf in India. Tarides’s engineers Sudha Parimala and Shakthi Kannan gave presentations on the OCaml platform and Sandmark, a continuous benchmarking tool for Multicore OCaml.

The Functional Conf is a three-day conference on everything functional programming! It’s a great event for beginners and experienced developers alike. Beginners have the opportunity to be introduced to different functional programming languages and understand their fundamental principles, and those who are more experienced have plenty to learn from both participants and speakers on how they have leveraged functional programming in their projects.

This year’s Functional Conf was held online and attended by people from around the world. It has been referred to as “Asia’s premiere functional programming conference” and welcomes participants from a broad range of backgrounds.

OCaml Platform 2022

Sudha Parimala’s talk is a great introduction to OCaml and its features, covering the installation process and "Hello World," as well as more advanced topics such as the text editor, publishing a library, and debugging. For the Functional Conf, it was a great way to give people interested in functional programming a taste of OCaml and what makes it stand out.

The presentation is a fantastic resource for people who are starting their journey in OCaml and want to know more about what they can do with the language, as well as for people further ahead looking for inspiration on different ways to progress.

Benchmarking (Multicore) OCaml

Shakthi Kannan’s talk centres around Sandmark, the benchmarking suite designed to test various parts of the OCaml compiler and its runtime. Benchmarking is a challenging process. As a result, there are few tools available that do the job well. OCaml’s Sandmark can test various performance axes such as CPU, memory, and I/O, as its tools build the compiler under various configuration settings. It also comes with a dashboard that lets the user explore the results of benchmarking runs in an interactive and easily digestible format.

In his talk, Shakthi describes the journey to Sandmark, originally developed to support the Multicore OCaml project. He covers the challenges the team faced and the lessons they learned along the way, especially with an evolving programming language and the need to support multiple CPU architectures. It’s an amazing resource for teams who are looking to set up their own benchmarking procedures, and it is also a great example of how to approach a difficult task as a team.

In Conclusion

The Functional Conf is a great conference that brings the growing community of functional programmers together. It offers opportunities for people to learn about functional programming and exchange information with others in similar fields. Tarides is proud to have participated in their effort to bring functional languages to the forefront of programming.

To learn more about Functional Conf you can visit their website, along with the individual pages on Sudha’s talk and Shakthi’s talk, respectively.