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, Dr KC Sivaramakrishnan 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. 

Dr KC Sivaramakrishnan is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the Chief Technology Officer of Tarides. He is  interested in building robust, secure and scalable systems using programming language technology. He led the development of Multicore OCaml, a concurrent and parallel extension of the OCaml programming language. Multicore OCaml is now merged into OCaml, and is available for general use in OCaml 5.0. Effect handlers introduced as part of the concurrency story of Multicore OCaml has had influence on the design of React Hooks and WebAssembly stack switching. .

This talk is mandatory for ICT(A), (B) and (C) and for COMP 205, COMP 313