An Invitation to OCaml

An Invitation to OCaml

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What is OCaml?

OCaml is an industrial strength functional programming language with an additional bonus of imperative and object-oriented features. OCaml has been around for more than 25 years now, with more and more exciting developments.

Why OCaml?

Amongst other thigs, OCaml offers -

• Strong Static typing
• Hindley-Milner type inference
• Algebraic Data Types and Pattern Matching
• Garbage collection

We’ll have a quick tour of how they make life as a developer more pleasant.

Wait, do you use it in real life?

Of course! We shall see some examples of applications written in OCaml. To name a few: Coq - theorem prover, Hack - programming language, Irmin - a git like data store and the list goes on.

But but, where is Multicore support?

It’s here!! OCaml 5, the first official release of Multicore OCaml was released in December 2022. OCaml 5 adds native support for parallelism and concurrency. OCaml is the first mainstream programming language to support Algebraic Effects. In this section, I’ll summarise the many-year journey of Multicore OCaml and the efforts it took to culminate into OCaml 5.

Introducing a Code of Conduct

In this talk, I’d like to present about our experiences with the process of introducing and enforcing a Code of Conduct to an open source community.

Open source communities are diverse with people from various backgrounds. It is important to foster the spirit of inclusiveness in it. A Code of Conduct reinforces this beleif to old and new contributors alike. People also know whom to contact in case of crises. The talk will cover:

• Why Code of Conduct
• How to choose (or write) the text
• Moderators
• Community response
• Evolving the Code of Conduct