The State of the Art in Functional Programming: Tarides at ICFP 2023

ICFP 2023

The 28th ACM Sigplan International Conference on Functional Programming is taking place in Seattle as I’m typing. This is the largest international research conference on functional programming, and this year’s event features fascinating keynotes (including one from OCaml’s very own Anil Madhavapeddy!), deep dives on various topics like compilation and verification, tutorials, networking opportunities, and workshops on several functional programming languages.

Out of this veritable cornucopia of things to do and see, we’re of course most excited about the OCaml Workshop. The OCaml Users and Developers Workshop brings together a diverse group of experts and enthusiasts, from academia and businesses using OCaml in practice, to present and discuss recent developments in the OCaml ecosystem. This year, that includes presentations on everything from MetaOCaml, to an effects-based I/O in OCaml 5, and a complete OCaml compiler for WebAssembly. You can keep up with the conference on ACM Sigplan’s YouTube channel where talks are being live streamed.

At Tarides, our mission is to bring sustainable and secure software infrastructure to the world, and a powerful way to achieve this is by supporting forums that promote these goals. ICFP fosters the sharing of ideas, research, and implementation of sound functional programming principles, which is why Tarides is proud to be a silver sponsor of this year’s ICFP conference.

Several colleagues from Tarides are participating in the OCaml Workshop presenting their hard work and research on extending the language, type system, and tooling. In this post, I will give you an overview of each presentation from the Tarides team. Check out the OCaml Workshop program if you would like to explore it on your own.

Tarides at ICFP

ICFP Keynote - Programming for the Planet

Anil Madhavapeddy, our partner at the University of Cambridge, held a morning keynote speech on the role of computer systems in analysing complex data from around the globe to aid conservation efforts. Anil argues that using functional programming can lead to systems that are more resilient, predictable, and reproducible. In his presentation, he outlines the benefits of using functional programming in planetary science, and how the cross-disciplinary research his team is doing is having a tangible impact on conservation projects.

For more information on how Anil is using functional programming to help the planet, you can visit the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits’s website. To understand how OCaml and SpaceOS will become the new global standard for satellites, you can read our blog post on SpaceOS.

Eio 1.0 - Effects Based I/O for OCaml 5

This talk introduces the concurrency library Eio and the main features of the 1.0 release. After the release of OCaml 5, which brought support for effects and Multicore, there was demand for a new I/O library in OCaml that would unify the community around a single I/O API as well as introduce new modern features to OCaml’s I/O support.

The presentation outlines how Eio is structured, including how it uses effects so that operations don’t block the whole domain, and also highlights significant new features including modularity, integrations, and tracing. If you’re curious to know more about OCaml’s new concurrency library, check out the presentation on Eio 1.0 on Saturday the 9th of September.

Tutorial - Porting Lwt Applications to OCaml 5 and Eio

Thomas Leonard and Jon Ludlam present a tutorial on porting Lwt applications to OCaml 5 and Eio. The tutorial shows users how to incrementally convert an existing Lwt application to Eio using theLwt_eio compatibility package. Doing so will usually result in simpler code, better diagnostics, and better performance.

If you can’t attend the tutorial at ICFP, you can check out the instructions on GitHub and follow the steps. Please let us know how well the tutorial works for you, and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask!

Runtime Detection of Data Races in OCaml with ThreadSanitizer

This presentation from Olivier Nicole and Fabrice Buoro focuses on ThreadSanitizer (TSan) and its ability to detect data races at runtime. With the new possibilities that parallel programming in OCaml brings, it also results in new kinds of bugs. Amongst these bugs, data races present a real danger as they are difficult to detect and can lead to very unexpected results.

That’s where TSan comes in! TSan is an open source library and program instrumentation pass to reliably detect data races at runtime. The presentation covers example usages of TSan, a look into how it works, interesting insights like challenges and limitations of the project, as well as related work including static and runtime detection. There will also be a demo of how to use it in your own code. If you want to know more, have a look at the talk on TSan at ICFP.

Building a Lock-Free STM for OCaml

This talk describes the process by which the kcas library, first developed to provide a primitive atomic lock-free multi-word compare-and-set operation, was recently turned into a proper lock-free software transactional memory implementation. By using transactional memory as an abstraction, Kcas offers developers both a relatively familiar programming model and composability.

The presentation details how Kcas composes transactions, its use cases and any trade offs, as well as the process behind how its design has evolved to its current state. Discover the full details by listening to the talk on Kcas, taking place on Saturday the 9th at the OCaml Workshop.

State of the OCaml Platform in 2023

The final presentation of the workshop provides an update on the OCaml Platform, including progress over the past few years and a roadmap for future work. The OCaml Platform has grown from one tool, opam, to a complete toolchain of reliable tools for OCaml developers.

The talk covers the main milestones of the past three years, including the release of odoc and the widespread adoption of Dune, before looking at the goals for the future which include seamless editor integration and filling in gaps in the OCaml development workflows. Be sure to check out the presentation on the OCaml Platform for more context and information.

We’d Love to Hear from You!

If you’re at ICFP please come and say hi, we’d love to chat about everything OCaml with you! The OCaml Workshop is located in the Grand Crescent, and the tutorial on Eio is at St Helens. The talks are available on ACM Sigplan’s youtube channel for remote viewing.

You can always tweet at us, or chat with the larger OCaml community on Discuss. Look out for more content on Tarides.com coming your way soon and sign up to our newsletter for up to date content - until next time!