OCaml for Fun & Profit: An Experience Report
summary
Practical experience shows OCaml ships production systems: Docker Desktop components and MirageOS kernels, a CI-backed opam pipeline that builds ~27,000 package versions, and a dependency solver that saturates ~80 cores. Uses include compiling OCaml to JS with js_of_ocaml / Melange and generating safe HTML with TyXML. Benefits are concrete: type-directed property testing, making invalid states unrepresentable, sharing code front-to-back, large-scale refactoring support, WASM experimentation, and incremental CI builds that process ~250 GB over several hours.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:34Motivation
- 3:20What is OCaml?
- 5:27Who uses OCaml & what for?
- 7:38Pragmatically solving problems
- 15:16How statically typed FP's write code
- 19:24Case study: Interop with other languages
- 23:10Case study: Extending the front-end
- 31:51Collaborate using types
- 34:12Refactoring fearlessly
- 37:44Growing your team
- 38:48Programming in the large
- 41:45Retrospective on using OCaml
- 44:03Wrap-up
- 44:43Resources
- 45:31Outro
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