Evolving the OCaml programming language

OCaml is a 25+ year old, industrial-strength functional programming language used widely in the industry and academia. OCaml is particularly favoured for its ability to write correct and efficient programs easily. Notable open-source projects using OCaml include the Rocq theorem prover, MirageOS Unikernel libraries, and static analysis tools and programming languages such as Hack, Flow, Infer, CompCert, etc. Some notable industrial users include Jane Street, Meta, Ahrefs and Docker.

Despite its age, OCaml community is strong and growing, bringing cutting edge programming language research and language tooling to its users without breaking critical legacy code. In this talk, I will present how the OCaml community approaches this difficult task, reflecting upon the development of the recent major release OCaml 5 which brought native support for concurrency and parallelism to the language and developing state-of-the-art platform tools to help our users be effective at using OCaml.

The key takeaways from the talk are:

• How OCaml language evolves with large features.

• The tools and practices that ensure that the new features don't break existing programs.

• Where the OCaml ecosystem falls behind when compared to other language ecosystems.

  • What we, the OCaml community, are doing to fix this.

  • Where you can contribute to this effort!