KC Sivaramakrishnan · Building Functional Systems

How do you acquire the fundamental computer skills to hack on a complexsystems project like OCaml? What’s missing and how do you go aboutbridging the gap?
There are many fundamental systems skills that go into working on alanguage like OCaml that only come with soaking in systems programming. Bysystems programming, I mean the ability to use tools like the command-line,editors, version control, build systems...

Can we have OCaml notebooks as pure client-side code? Can these notebooks haverich editor support (highlighting, formatting, types on hover, autocompletion,inline diagnostics, etc.)? Can you take packages from OPAM and use them in thesenotebooks?
The answer to all of these turns out to be a resounding yes thanks forx-ocaml. This post is my experiment playingwith x-ocaml and integrating that into this blog....

In the last post,we looked at uniqueness mode and how uniqueness may be used to optimise. As wewill see, uniqueness alone is insufficient in practice, and we also need aconcept of linearity for uniqueness to be useful.
Capturing unique values
Let’s start with an example. Recall the signature of the unique referencemodule....

Jane Street has been developing modal types for OCaml – an extension to thetype system where modes track properties of values, such as their scope, threadsharing, and aliasing. These modes restrict which operations are permitted onvalues, enabling safer...