Discover our latest posts on #ocaml and explore related insights and stories.
Solve the 2022 Advent of Code Puzzles with OCaml
Too many programmers only know OCaml through a functional programming language overview course at university. They erroneously believe OCaml is used primarily in academia rather than in the real world. Not only is OCaml already used in several prominent businesses, it can also be used for fun projec…
Technical Writer
Six Surprising Reasons the OCaml Programming Language is Good for Business
Functional programming languages have been around since the 1950's, when the first high-level languages were used to program early computers. Examples of functional programming languages include OCaml, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Scala, and Common Lisp. Choosing the right programming language is criti…
Communications Officer
OCaml 5 at Open Source India 2022
With OCaml 5 just around the corner, it's been a really exciting year to attend conferences all over the world. Just recently, I presented some highlights of the OCaml 5 update, building on KC Sivaramakrishnan's great keynote address at the 19th annual Open Source India 2022 conference. Since Taride…
Senior Software Engineer
Presenting on Algebraic Effects at FP-SYD
At ICFP this year, KC Sivaramakrishnan gave two talks that put OCaml 5 in the spotlight: his keynote, “Retrofitting Concurrency - Lessons from the Engine Room,” and the opening presentation of the OCaml workshop, “OCaml 5.0 - Concurrent and Parallel Programming.” Effect Handlers feature heav…
Principal Software Engineer
Up-to-Date Online Documentation
Into the Fire The OCaml ecosystem relies on various resources and infrastructure such as ocaml.org, OCaml Docker images, opam-repo-ci, that are built and deployed using OCurrent. OCurrent is a library to express workflows and keep things up to date. As many of these projects are created using the sa…
Senior Software Engineer
Porting Charrua-Unix and Rawlink to Eio
This article describes the porting of the DHCP daemon charrua-unix and its companion library rawlink to Eio for the upcoming OCaml 5 release. Before we get started, it makes sense to briefly describe what DHCP is and how we use it in production. What is DHCP? DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configurati…
Principal Software Engineer
OCaml's Platform Installer Alpha Release
Yesterday we announced the OCaml 5 beta release, and today we're excited to introduce the OCaml Platform Installer! The OCaml Platform is the recommended toolchain when working with OCaml. This new installer enables programmers to quickly set up the OCaml developer environment, so they don't need to…
Technical Writer
OCaml 5 Beta Release
Back in June, we announced the OCaml 5 alpha release, and today we're excited to announce the first beta release! Now is an excellent time to test it and report positive or negative feedback on your projects (i.e., did it work, did you see impressive performance speed up, did you have issues finding…
Technical Writer
Real World OCaml Book Giveaway!
Real World OCaml is a fantastic book on OCaml and functional programming – a great resource for beginners and experienced users alike. At Tarides, we want to support new learners of OCaml as much as we can, making it easier for people to become part of the vibrant community surrounding the languag…
Communications Officer
8 OCaml Libraries to Make Your Life Easier
OCaml is a statically-typed programming language that emphasizes readability, programmer efficiency, and semantic clarity. This powerful and efficient language has been gaining popularity among developers. The growing adoption of OCaml is because it's fast, type safe, and secure. It can be used in i…
Technical Writer
ICFP 2022 Review
After two years of online conferences, it was fantastic to have ICFP 2022 in person. The conference organisers had done a fantastic job adjusting to online conferences, but nothing beats the hallway track for meeting new people and catching up with old friends. This year, Slovenia's capital hosted t…
Principal Software Engineer
Irmin in the Browser
Introduction Over the past six months, I have been working on using Irmin in the browser, including irmin-server and the GraphQL interface. This has been fun and a great learning journey for me. Before this internship, irmin-server was primarily a Unix-based application. My project was to port irmin…
Intern Software Engineer
Faster Incremental Builds with Dune 3
In February 2022, we released Dune 3.0. This updated version is the result of considerable development work over the previous six months. Dune 3.0 contains many new features, one of which is “watch mode,” an exciting new feature explained below. As a build system, Dune’s main goal is to build …
Principal Software Engineer
The Magic of Merlin
Tarides provides support and development services for OCaml tools, packages, and libraries for our commercial partners and for the benefit of the entire OCaml community. We focus on groundbreaking innovation, feature development, and crucial maintenance of OCaml-based projects. One of these projects…
Technical Writer
Functional Conf 2022
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 pro…
Communications Officer
OCaml 5 Alpha Release
OCaml 5 is live! This major release introduces domains and effects, delivering unprecedented speed and efficiency to OCaml. Testing shows that OCaml 5 is able to outperform Go and closely match Rust in terms of performance. Keep reading for more details! Tarides is thrilled that the alpha release of…
Communications Officer
OCaml.org Reboot: User-Centric Design & Content
Tarides is pleased to announce the launch of the updated community site, ocaml.org. Over the past year and a half, we have supported and collaborated with members of the OCaml community on the creation of an updated community website. We are proud to present new features and improvements that will b…
Principal Software Engineer
'Signals and Threads' Podcast: What is an Operating System?
November has become MirageOS month! Between the upcoming official MirageOS 4.0 release, making custom Christmas Tree garlands with MirageOS on a Raspberry Pi, and now this "What is an Operating System?" podcast (featuring Tarides advisor and core MirageOS maintainer Anil Madhavapeddy), it truly is M…
Technical Writer
Tarides Engineers to Present at ICFP 2021
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the OCaml Language! It's an exciting time for OCaml programmers and enthusiasts. A fun and informative way to celebrate OCaml's birthday is to attend the 26th Annual International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), held online this year due to ongoin…
Technical Writer
Benchmarking OCaml projects with current-bench
Regular CI systems are optimised for workloads that do not require stable performance over time. This makes them unsuitable for running performance benchmarks. current-bench provides a predictable environment for performance benchmarks and a UI for analysing results over time. Similar to a CI system…
Software Engineer
Recent and upcoming changes to Merlin
Merlin is a language server for the OCaml programming language; that is, a daemon that connects to your favourite text editor and provides the usual services of an IDE: instant feedback on warnings and errors, autocompletion, "type of the code under the cursor", "go to definition", etc. As we (Fréd…
Principal Software Engineer
Building portable user interfaces with Nottui and Lwd
At Tarides, we build many tools and writing UI is usually a tedious task. In this post we will see how to write functional UIs in OCaml using the Nottui & Lwd libraries. These libraries were developed for Citty, a frontend to the Continuous Integration service of OCaml Labs. In thi…
Principal Software Engineer
Tarides is now a sponsor of the OCaml Software Foundation
Tarides is pleased to provide support for the OCaml Software Foundation, a non-profit foundation hosted by the Inria Foundation. The OCaml Software Foundation's mission is to promote the OCaml programming language and its ecosystem by supporting the growth of a diverse and international community of…
Irmin: September 2020 update
This post will survey the latest design decisions and performance improvements made to irmin-pack, the Irmin storage backend used by Tezos. Tezos is an open-source blockchain technology, written in OCaml, which uses many libraries from the MirageOS ecosystem. For more context on the design of irmin-…
Introducing irmin-pack
irmin-pack is an Irmin storage backend that we developed over the last year specifically to meet the Tezos use-case. Tezos nodes were initially using an LMDB-based backend for their storage, which after only a year of activity led to 250 GB disk space usage, with a monthly growth of 25 GB. Our goal …
Senior Software Engineer
Fuzzing OCamlFormat with AFL and Crowbar
AFL (and fuzzing in general) is often used to find bugs in low-level code like parsers, but it also works very well to find bugs in high level code, provided the right ingredients. We applied this technique to feed random programs to OCamlFormat and found many formatting bugs. OCamlFormat is a tool …
Principal Software Engineer
Introducing the GraphQL API for Irmin 2.0
With the release of Irmin 2.0.0, we are happy to announce a new package - irmin-graphql, which can be used to serve data from Irmin over HTTP. This blog post will give you some examples to help you get started, there is also a section in the irmin-tutorial with similar information. To avoid writing …
Irmin v2
We are pleased to announce Irmin 2.0.0, a major release of the Git-like distributed branching and storage substrate that underpins MirageOS. We began the release process for all the components that make up Irmin back in May 2019, and there have been close to 1000 commits since Irmin 1.4.0 released …
Mr. MIME - Parse and generate emails
We're glad to announce the first release of mrmime, a parser and a generator of emails. This library provides an OCaml way to analyze and craft an email. The eventual goal is to build an entire unikernel-compatible stack for email (such as SMTP or IMAP). In this article, we will show what is current…
Software Engineer
Decompress: Experiences with OCaml optimization
In our first article we mostly discussed the API design of decompress and did not talk too much about the issue of optimizing performance. In this second article, we will relate our experiences of optimizing decompress. As you might suspect, decompress needs to be optimized a lot. It was used by sev…
Software Engineer
An introduction to fuzzing OCaml with AFL, Crowbar and Bun
American Fuzzy Lop or AFL is a fuzzer: a program that tries to find bugs in other programs by sending them various auto-generated inputs. This article covers the basics of AFL and shows an example of fuzzing a parser written in OCaml. It also introduces two extensions: the Crowbar library which can …
Senior Software Engineer
Decompress: The New Decompress API
RFC 1951 is one of the most used standards. Indeed, when you launch your Linux kernel, it inflates itself according zlib standard, a superset of RFC 1951. Being a widely-used standard, we decided to produce an OCaml implementation. In the process, we learned many lessons about developing OCaml where…
Software Engineer
Release of OCamlFormat 0.10
We are pleased to announce the release of OCamlFormat 0.10 (available on opam). There have been numerous changes since the last release, so here is a comprehensive list of the new features and breaking changes to help the transition from OCamlFormat 0.9. ocamlformat-0.10 now works on the 4.08 AST, a…
Senior Software Engineer
On the road to Irmin v2
Over the past few months, we have been heavily engaged in release engineering the Irmin 2.0 release, which covers multiple years of work on all of its constituent elements. We first began Irmin in late 2013 to act as a Git-like distributed and branchable storage substrate that would let us escape th…
An introduction to OCaml PPX ecosystem
These last few months, I spent some time writing new OCaml PPX rewriters or contributing to existing ones. It's a really fun experience. Toying around with the AST taught me a lot about a language I thought I knew really well. Turns out I actually had no idea what I was doing all these years. All jo…
Senior Software Engineer
Dune 1.9.0
Tarides is pleased to have contributed to the dune 1.9.0 release which introduces the concept of library variants. Thanks to this update, unikernels builds are becoming easier and faster in the MirageOS universe! This also opens the door for a better cross-compilation story, which will ease the addi…
Senior Software Engineer
Release of OCamlFormat 0.9
We are pleased to announce the release of OCamlFormat (available on opam). There have been numerous changes since the last release, so here is a comprehensive list of the new features and breaking changes to help the transition from OCamlFormat 0.8. Additional dependencies OCamlFormat now requires: …
Senior Software Engineer
Release of Base64
MirageOS is a library operating system written from the ground up in OCaml. It has an impossible and incredibly huge goal to re-implement all of the world! Looking back at the work accomplished by the MirageOS team, it appears that's what happened for several years. Re-implementing the entire stack,…
Software Engineer
How configurator reads C constants
Dune comes with a library to query OS-specific information, called configurator. It is able to evaluate C expressions and turn them into OCaml value. Surprisingly, it even works when compiling for a different architecture. How can it do that? …
Principal Software Engineer
ocaml-git 2.0
I'm very happy to announce a new major release of ocaml-git (2.0). This release is a 2-year effort to get a revamped streaming API offering a full control over memory allocation. This new version also adds production-ready implementations of the wire protocol: git push and git pull now work very rel…
Software Engineer
OCamlFormat 0.8
We are proud to announce the release of OCamlFormat 0.8 (available on opam). To ease the transition from the previous 0.7 release here are some highlights of the new features of this release. The full changelog is available on the project repository. Precedence of options In the previous version you…
Senior Software Engineer
OCaml Workshop 2018
The OCaml Users and Developers Workshop brings together industrial users of OCaml with academics and hackers who are working on extending the language, type system and tools. OCaml 2018 was held on September 27th, 2018 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, colocated with ICFP 2018. Check Tarides' talks: RFCs…
Software Engineer
Dune 1.2.0
After a tiny but important patch release as 1.1.1, the dune team is thrilled to announce the release of dune 1.2.0! Here are some highlights of the new features in that version. The full list of changes can be found in the dune repository. Watch mode When developing, it is common to edit a file, run…
Principal Software Engineer
OCaml Users in Paris (OUPS)
Thomas Gazagnaire gave a presentation on MirageOS to the OCaml meetup in Paris. Check the slides for more details. …
