Tarides at BOB Konferenz 2025

BOB Konferenz is a 10-year-old conference whose tagline is: "The software development conference for everyone dissatisfied with the status quo"! Indeed, BOB is a conference that focusses on a variety of subjects that strongly converge with the interests of Tarides (and the OCaml world in general). It aims to cover topics such as functional programming, "fancy types" (dependent types, gradual typing, linear types, ...), formal methods for correctness and robustness, abstractions for concurrency and parallelism, controlled side effects, next-generation IDEs, and much more!

The convergence has been so strong that, over the years, some big names from the OCaml community have shown up — like Anil Madhavapeddy, Hannes Mehnert, Gabriel Scherer, and even Xavier Leroy! This is one of the many reasons why Tarides decided to sponsor the 2024 edition and send Sabine Schmaltz and Leandro Ostera.

For the 2025 edition, March 14, 2025, in Berlin, Xavier Van de Woestyne had the privilege of presenting Tarides’ work on editor support for OCaml during his talk "Beyond the Basics of LSP: Advanced IDE Services for OCaml." Accompanied by Antonin Decimo, who attended the conference, Xavier travelled to BOBKonf 2025 to share their insights and experience.

A Wide Range of Interesting Talks

The BOB program is wonderfully eclectic, and every talk is an opportunity to discover something new! For example, after a keynote on Local-First software — which included many fascinating use cases with potential applications for Irmin. We had the chance to attend talks on abstraction, speculative reasoning about functions based on their types (for instance, a function of type a -> a having only one possible inhabitant), the application of separation logic for concurrency in Idris, and even collaborations between engineers and mathematicians on the specification of formal methods.

We explored the functional programming counterpart to design patterns — with a strong emphasis on the power of robust module systems, something that deeply resonates with us as OCaml developers. That was followed by a deep reflection on object-oriented programming from a functional programmer’s perspective, a clear explanation of how recursive definitions work in Lean, and, to wrap it all up, a guide to common pitfalls to avoid when building distributed systems with microservices.

All in all, it was an intense and inspiring day — packed with ideas that strongly resonated with us. From our perspective, the themes explored throughout the conference aligned closely with the ideological and technical choices we’ve made at Tarides, particularly our commitment to OCaml. But beyond that, many of the talks echoed the challenges and directions of the projects we actively maintain!

About our Presentation

Although the goal of our presentation (you can watch the recording on BOBKonf's website) was to discuss OCaml editor support (through Merlin, Ocaml-lsp-server, and its clients, Visual Studio Code and Emacs), we aimed to present an approach and a set of features that wouldn’t limit our audience to just OCaml users. Instead, we wanted to spark a conversation with other IDE users/maintainers to share ideas and implementation perspectives!

We believe the presentation was well-received, generating some very interesting questions along with positive conversations about how some of the ideas we presented could be applied to proof assistants like Isabelle, Idris2, and Agda.

There was a proposal to combine our efforts to improve the Language Server Protocol, making it even more welcoming for certain functional languages that leverage interactive features (where the acceptance model is primarily based on voting). From our perspective, these were excellent and motivating responses!

Meet and Greet

Beyond the technical side, one of the great things about conferences is the chance to meet people—catch up with familiar faces, make new connections, and have meaningful conversations around topics we’re all passionate about! From our perspective, even though the schedule is quite packed, the talk slots are spaced out just enough to let us catch our breath — but more importantly, to connect and chat with members of the community. It really helps to foster a friendly, sociable atmosphere!

To Conclude

Attending conferences is an integral part of our work as engineers—for several important reasons:

• Keeping up with the latest in technology and research
• Sharing our progress and presenting the work we’ve been doing
• Initiating potential collaborations with people driven by similar goals and motivations.

So yes, it's important — but at conferences like BOB, it’s also a real pleasure! The talks are truly fascinating (we’re already looking forward to the video recordings so we can catch up on what we missed), and the interactions are incredibly motivating for our work. If, like us, you’re interested in functional programming, fancy types, formal methods, and many other exciting topics, don’t hesitate to check out BOB’s YouTube channel – and maybe even consider attending next time!

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