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We Host Our First OCaml Retreat in India!
Hacking retreats are great ways for programmers to connect, explore new ideas, and learn from each other. One of the most popular OCaml retreats is the much-loved Mirage retreat, organised annually in Morocco. But for us OCaml enthusiasts located elsewhere, the journey can be challenging (not to men…
Senior Software Engineer
Communications Officer
Under the Hood: Developing Multicore Property-Based Tests for OCaml 5
In 2022, Multicore OCaml became reality. Programming on multiple threads brings new possibilities, but also new complexities. In order to foster confidence in OCaml 5 and retain OCaml's reputation as a trustworthy and memory-safe platform, Tarides has developed multicoretests: Two property-based tes…
Principal Software Engineer
Creating the SyntaxDocumentation Command - Part 1: Merlin
OCaml development has never been more enchanting, thanks to Merlin – the wizard of the editor realm. The magic of Merlin is something that makes programming in OCaml a very nice experience. By Merlin, I don't mean the old gray-haired, staff-bearing magic guy. I'm talking about the editor service t…
Software Engineer
Multicore Testing Tools: DSCheck Pt 2
Welcome to part two! If you haven't already, check out part one, where we introduce DSCheck and share one of its uses in a naive counter implementation. This post will give you a behind-the-scenes look at how DSCheck works its magic, including the theory behind it and how to write a test for our nai…
Senior Software Engineer
Communications Officer
Updates to OCaml.org's Learn Section: Enhancing UI and UX
Over the past year, the OCaml.org team has been hard at work addressing user feedback to make the OCaml.org Learn section more accessible and organised in order to facilitate learning OCaml and enriching the overall OCaml experience. In 2023, I joined the OCaml.org team as a UX /UI Designer. One of …
UX/UI Designer
NetHSM: Bringing Open Source to the World of Hardware Security Modules
Nitrokey is one of the world’s foremost open-source hardware security companies. They develop IT security hardware for data encryption, decryption, and signing, including key and user authentication. After eight years of development, they recently released the first fully open-source Hardware Secu…
Communications Officer
Principal Software Engineer
Eio 1.0 Release: Introducing a new Effects-Based I/O Library for OCaml
The OCaml 5 update brought much-anticipated support for programming on multiple cores. It also introduced support for concurrency via effect handlers – one of the first mainstream languages to do so. This significant update has had profound performance and UX implications, propelling OCaml into ne…
Communications Officer
Principal Software Engineer
Advisor
My experience at IndiaFOSS 2023: Community, Workshop, and Talks
There are plenty of exciting computer programming events happening in India, including the 5 day OCaml retreat that Tarides is hosting in Auroville this week – look out for future posts on that! Another great (and bigger!) event is the annual free and open source software conference IndiaFOSS orga…
Senior Software Engineer
A Time for Change: Our Response to the White House Cybersecurity Press Release
As seasoned proponents of safety-by-design, we were pleased to see the February 26th White House press release titled "Future Software Should Be Memory Safe." The accompanying report touches on important topics, most significantly regarding the critical importance of memory safety. The U.S. governme…
Two Major Improvements in odoc: Introducing Search Engine Integration
In the world of OCaml documentation generation, there have been two significant enhancements that promise to make navigating OCaml documentation easier and more efficient. These improvements are divided into two distinct but interrelated components: changes in odoc itself and improvements in a searc…
Senior Software Engineer
Technical Writer
My Experience With Tarides at ICFP 2023!
ICFP 2024 will be upon us sooner than you might think! The call for papers closes on the 28th of February, and I wish everyone submitting good luck. Hopefully I will see you around Milan this upcoming September (at the OCaml Workshop, of course!) and to stave off your ICFP cravings until then, enjoy…
Senior Software Engineer
Multicore Testing Tools: DSCheck Pt 1
Reaping the plentiful benefits of parallel programming requires the careful management of the intricacies that come with it. Tarides played a significant part in making OCaml Multicore a reality, and we have continued to work on supporting tools that make parallel programming in OCaml as seamless as…
Senior Software Engineer
Communications Officer
Improving OCaml.org to Provide an Engaging UX and Trusted User Resources
The OCaml.org team, which includes members from Tarides, have been working hard to improve OCaml.org. In the first half of 2023, our primary focus was on the much-needed overhaul of OCaml.org's documentation and overall UX Design. We aspired to enhance user experience and accessibility throughout th…
Technical Writer
Are Your Programs Doing What You Think They're Doing? Introducing Monitoring Tools for Multicore OCaml
As programs grow in size and complexity, they become more challenging to optimise. When the cause of a particular performance issue can theoretically be attributed to multiple sources, developers need concrete data to drive their decision making and avoid time-consuming guesswork. As you can imagine…
Communications Officer
MirageOS: Designing a More Resilient Networking Stack With µTCP
There is no room for complacency in software development! In the OCaml ecosystem, improvements are continuously introduced to optimise existing workflows, introduce new features, and boost performance. MirageOS is a toolchain for creating unikernels (very small images that embed both an application …
Principal Software Engineer
What are Data Races? And do They Threaten Your Business?
Imagine you have a brand-new coffee machine. One morning, you traipse excitedly down the stairs only to discover that, alas, your appliance has turned into a potato. The next day, it turns back into a coffee machine. And so it continues: on some days, it dispenses you perfect, frothy coffee; on othe…
Communications Officer
Meet odoc, OCaml's Documentation Generator
Effective documentation is a cornerstone of software development. It helps developers understand how to use a language, its libraries, and its tooling, which leads to more robust and maintainable code. When it comes to OCaml, odoc is the wizard behind the scenes, ensuring developers not only underst…
Technical Writer
Announcing the ORCHIDE Project: Powering Satellite Innovation
It has been a few months since we announced our new product for both older and newer models of satellites: SpaceOS. Since then, there have been exciting updates to the use of SpaceOS for innovative satellite applications. Tarides is thrilled to announce our partnership with several esteemed organisa…
Communications Officer
OCaml Survey: Developers' Perception, Interest, and Perceived Barriers
Tarides is conducting a survey targeting non-OCaml programmers to learn their thoughts about this functional programming language and uncover any misconceptions surrounding it. Please take a few mintues to fill it out if you haven't yet done so. This post shows our preliminary findings based on a re…
Technical Writer
OCaml: Memory Safety and Beyond
Your choice of programming language matters. A recent press release from the US National Security Agency (NSA), in tandem with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) alongside international cybersecurity agencies, urges the adoption of memory-safe programming languages for en…
International Disability Day 2023: Why It Matters
When I was in my early 20s, I developed a chronic illness that (amongst other things) has affected my mobility. Becoming disabled is an eye-opening experience, as it makes you acutely aware of two things: First, there are many ways in which society genuinely tries to help people with disabilities, a…
Communications Officer
How to Install OCaml 5: A Video Tutorial
Have you had difficulty installing OCaml for your projects? We have created a video tutorial showing you how to use Opam to install OCaml on Linux and macOS. All you need to complete the tutorial is a computer running either Linux or macOS, and an internet connection. By the end of the tutorial you …
Communications Officer
OCaml Hacking Day in Chennai!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a programmer in possession of a free Saturday afternoon must be in want of a good old OCaml hacking session. To address this pressing need, we recently hosted another OCaml Hacking Day event – this time at our Tarides India office in Chennai. We had a t…
Communications Officer
WebAssembly Support for OCaml: Introducing Wasm_of_Ocaml
OCaml is constantly evolving. Developers collaborate to bring support for new features, improve workflows, and resolve pain points. To this end, the OCaml-Wasm GitHub organisation was recently established. Its goal is to bring WebAssembly support to OCaml. WebAssembly, more commonly known as Wasm, i…
Communications Officer
Tutorial: Building a Browser Extension With Irmin
Irmin is a collection of OCaml libraries that makes it easy to build applications with Git-like data stores. We recently released irmin-client and irmin-server as official Irmin packages. These packages open up a new way to use Irmin by implementing a custom protocol that lets you write a client app…
Off to the Races: Using ThreadSanitizer in OCaml
OCaml Multicore opened up a new world of performance for developers, something that Nomadic Labs has tested with great results. Rather than relying on one core to do everything, the program can take advantage of multiple cores simultaneously for a significant performance boost. With new programming …
Senior Software Engineer
Senior Software Engineer
Communications Officer
Prioritising Mental Health at Tarides
In a world that never stops, it's easy to get lost in the hustle and bustle of daily life, often overlooking the importance of maintaining our mental well-being, one of the most vital aspects of our existence. Especially on World Mental Health Day, observed every October 10th, it's crucial to reflec…
Technical Writer
Porting OBuilder to FreeBSD
OBuilder is a tool for performing arbitrary, reproduceable builds of OCaml-related software within a sandboxed environment. It is used by the CI team at Tarides to provide OCaml-based Continuous Integration (CI) for projects like opam-repo-ci, ocaml-ci, and multicoretest-ci. Originally written for L…
Principal Software Engineer
Principal Software Engineer
Tutorial: How to Port Lwt Applications to Eio
Thomas Leonard and Jonathan Ludlam hosted a tutorial on porting Lwt applications to OCaml 5 and Eio at arguably the world's largest functional programming conference: ICFP. The tutorial is a great introduction to Eio, with a clear step-by-step approach that is accessible to developers of different e…
Communications Officer
A Year of SpaceOS: Showing the World the Benefits of OCaml
I have had the pleasure of attending some great conferences over the past year, where I have presented some of the latest and most exciting OCaml use cases developed at Tarides. With our new SpaceOS solution, Tarides can provide significant quality-of-life upgrades for industries that rely on satell…
Senior Software Engineer
Our Experience at Tarides: Projects From Our Internships in 2023
Internships at Tarides We regularly have the pleasure of hosting internships where we work with engineers from all over the world on a diverse range of projects. By collaborating with people who are relatively new to the OCaml ecosystem, we get to benefit from their perspective. Seeing things with f…
Intern Software Engineer
Intern Software Engineer
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 …
Communications Officer
Your Programming Language and its Impact on the Cybersecurity of Your Application
Did you know that the programming language you use can have a huge impact on the cybersecurity of your applications? In a 2022 meeting of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Senior Technical Advisor Bob Lord commented that: “About two-thir…
Senior Software Engineer
Kcas: Building a Lock-Free STM for OCaml (2/2)
This is the follow-up post continuing the discussion of the development of Kcas. Part 1 discussed the development done on the library to improve performance and add a transaction mechanism that makes it easy to compose atomic operations without really adding more expressive power. In this part we'll…
Principal Software Engineer
Kcas: Building a Lock-Free STM for OCaml (1/2)
In the past few months I've had the pleasure of working on the Kcas library. In this and a follow-up post, I will discuss the history and more recent development process of optimising Kcas and turning it into a proper Software Transactional Memory (STM) implementation for OCaml. While this is not me…
Principal Software Engineer
OBuilder on macOS
The CI team at Tarides provides critical infrastucture to support the OCaml community. At the heart of that infrastructure is providing a cluster of machines for running jobs. This blog post details how we improved our support for macOS and moved closer to our goal of supporting all Tier1 OCaml plat…
System Administrator
OCaml in Space - Welcome SpaceOS!
Our mission is to build sustainable and secure software infrastructure that will not only work for decades but also positively impact the world. This includes our work on essential open-source libraries and tooling in the OCaml space, but also extends to include cutting-edge innovation through Mirag…
Head Consulting Services
Reflections on the MirageOS Retreat in Morocco
Introduction Since we are a hybrid remote and distributed company, everyone at Tarides knows first-hand how important in-person retreats are for collaborating on software development. They give us a chance to focus more deeply on our work, collaborate closely, and learn from one another. We are part…
Senior Software Engineer
Communications Officer
Senior Software Engineer
Principal Software Engineer
Senior Software Engineer
Senior Software Engineer
Sandmark: Boosting Multicore Projects with Performance Benchmarking
Introduction In the realm of software development, continuous improvement is paramount. When it comes to Multicore projects, the need for thorough benchmarking becomes even more critical. This is where Sandmark comes into play. Sandmark, developed for the OCaml programming language, has proven to be…
Senior Software Engineer
OCaml-CI Renovated
OCaml-CI started with the goal of making a better continuous build system for OCaml projects. When we began in 2019, the goals were clear: it should provide a zero-configuration experience for OCaml projects using opam and Dune, and it should use an incremental architecture to avoid expensive recomp…
Principal Software Engineer
Principal Software Engineer
Making OCaml 5 Succeed for Developers and Organisations
OCaml recently won the ACM SIGPLAN PL Software Award. The award recognises a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language implementation, research, and tools. It is especially notable that 4 out of the 14 named OCaml compiler developers are affiliated with Tarides: Anil,…
Zero-Day Attacks: What Are They, and Can a Language Like OCaml Protect You?
Zero-day attacks have been getting increased media attention lately, but what are they? And how can we protect ourselves? Google’s Project Zero tracks zero-day vulnerabilities at major software vendors. In 2021, their tracker noted the detection and disclosure of 58 in-the-wild zero-day exploits, …
Communications Officer
OCaml Receives the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award
OCaml has received one of the most prestigious awards in the field of programming languages, and we are very thrilled that four of the award winners are from Tarides. This represents a huge success for the language, the named maintainers, and everyone who has worked on improving OCaml. We want to th…
Optimising Archive Node Storage for Tezos
For the past few years, Tarides has been responsible for the storage component of Tezos, from L1 and L2 shells up to the Tezos protocol. In 2022, our main focus was on improving storage performance and UX for running nodes and bakers. Our efforts resulted in significant improvements, including reduc…
OCaml at MinidebConf TN 2023
MinidebConf TN 23 was organised by Debian Developers and Villupuram Linux Users Group (VGLUG) as a precursor to DebConf 23 in September at Kochi, India. I had an opportunity to attend and speak at MiniDebConf TN. I presented two sessions, one built on our experiences of introducing a Code of Conduct…
Senior Software Engineer
Compiler Hacking in Cambridge is Back!
What’s the best way to spend a Friday evening? We think most people would agree that hacking on OCaml is pretty much at the top of that list (although full disclosure, our sample size for this data could be larger). On Friday the 24th of February, Tarides’s UK office hosted an evening of compile…
Communications Officer
More Than a Day: How Does Tarides Promote Women in Tech?
The aim of International Women’s Day is to raise awareness of gender inequalities and call for the empowerment of women worldwide. The goal is to forge a gender equal world and advance women’s equality in all forms. Within the field of technology, the focus is on elevating and advancing gender p…
COO
The Journey to OCaml Multicore: Bringing Big Ideas to Life
Continuing our blog series on Multicore OCaml, this blog provides an overview of the road to OCaml Multicore. If you want to know how you can use OCaml 5 in your own projects, please contact us for more information. We also recommend watching KC Sivaramakrishnan's ICFP 22' talk Retrofitting Concurre…
Communications Officer
Lambda Retreat Report
Today we're taking a little pause from our OCaml 5 series to talk about a programming retreat. I spent a week in the woods with fellow programmers at the Lambda Retreat. It was a wonderful way to explore the nature of computations, abrstractions, and paradigms. Although I mostly work in OCaml, it wa…
Senior Software Engineer
