An Invitation to OCaml
summary
Industrial-strength functional language with imperative and OO features, OCaml claims Hindley-Milner type inference, algebraic data types, pattern matching and a generational GC; real-world users include Jane Street, Facebook (Infer, Hack), Mirage, Coq and Microsoft Research (F). Major recent work replaces the global-GC lock to enable parallelism: OCaml 5 (Multicore) introduces domains and algebraic-effect handlers, with domains mapped to OS threads and effect-based concurrency. Libraries built on it include eio and domain slip* (async/await, parallel-for); C FFI remains supported but exposes thread-safety issues in some C libraries.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:22What is OCaml
- 0:44What is Functional Programming
- 2:42OCaml History
- 3:24Programming Languages Matter
- 4:17Functional Programming predicts the future
- 5:49Who are we
- 6:33Core principles
- 7:44Immutability
- 10:33Algebraic Data Types
- 11:48Higher Order Functions
- 13:02Composable Functions
- 13:45Garbage Collector
- 14:57Industrial Uses
- 16:10Other Examples
- 17:50Multicore Camel
- 18:51Release Date
- 19:29History
- 20:15Multicore
- 20:49Domainslip
- 21:18EIO
- 22:08Lightweight Threats
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