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A better build system for OCaml

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: A better build system for OCaml

#61

Post by int_19h »

codr7 wrote: post #6

I spent several years in Haskell land a while back, my first functional experience after Lisp. Ocaml never clicked for me, I have a rare form of semicolon allergy and Haskell just looked a lot nicer to me. But then I recently tried Reason and enjoyed it A LOT, so everything Ocaml is suddenly interesting.

F#, while missing some of the more interesting features of OCaml (e.g. the expressiveness of its module system), also has indentation-sensitive syntax that ditches a lot of the scaffolding, including semicolons in most cases:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#62

Post by perryprog »

tombert wrote: post #4

I have to respect Jane Street for proving that HM-typed functional programming can be production-ready and extremely fast when given enough love. I still occasionally hear things about how the more academic-styled functional languages can't work in production, but Ocaml shows that it absolutely can work, even with high performance requirements.

NoRedInk[0] also uses some Haskell in their backend, as well as Elm for most of their frontend. They've also worked some with Roc according to a blog post from a few years back; not sure if using it.

[0] https://blog.noredink.com

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#63

Post by aaronbrethorst »

triyambakam wrote: post #47
Lyngbakr wrote: post #7

They did an episode of Signals and Threads (Jane Street's technical podcast) about their build systems back in 2020¥. Highly recommended, as are the other episodes, especially The Future of Programming with Richard Eisenberg° and What is an Operating System? with Anil Madhavapeddy§. ¥ https://signalsandthreads.com/build-systems/ ° https://signalsandthreads.com/future-of-programming/ § https://signalsandthreads.com/wh…

Very interesting footnote system. Is it just for fun and aesthetic or have a deeper origin or purpose?

whatever it is, it looks like their first time using it. here's the last footnote I see from that account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39964109

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#65

Post by whydid »

elzbardico wrote: post #58

Whenever I see posts from Janestreet blog I laugh inside thinking how working on the financial industry at Jane is probably more fun and rewarding than some 90% of the jobs in the so-called tech industry.

Grass is always greener my friend.

Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for custom reporting.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#66

Post by c0redump »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #7

They did an episode of Signals and Threads (Jane Street's technical podcast) about their build systems back in 2020¥. Highly recommended, as are the other episodes, especially The Future of Programming with Richard Eisenberg° and What is an Operating System? with Anil Madhavapeddy§. ¥ https://signalsandthreads.com/build-systems/ ° https://signalsandthreads.com/future-of-programming/ § https://signalsandthreads.com/wh…

Great suggestions, I also really liked “Multicast and the Markets”

https://signalsandthreads.com/multicast-and-the-markets/

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#67

Post by ericjmorey »

whydid wrote: post #65
elzbardico wrote: post #58

Whenever I see posts from Janestreet blog I laugh inside thinking how working on the financial industry at Jane is probably more fun and rewarding than some 90% of the jobs in the so-called tech industry.

Grass is always greener my friend. Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for custom reporting.

Probably not the case at Jane Street

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#68

Post by udev4096 »

whydid wrote: post #65
elzbardico wrote: post #58

Whenever I see posts from Janestreet blog I laugh inside thinking how working on the financial industry at Jane is probably more fun and rewarding than some 90% of the jobs in the so-called tech industry.

Grass is always greener my friend. Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for custom reporting.

OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques.

I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#69

Post by Syzygies »

n144q wrote: post #12

I wonder if anyone has used Jane Street's open source OCaml libraries and tools for somewhat serious projects. I took a brief look at these things, and my impression is that their stuff isn't "ready" for anyone outside Jane Street, even though they put a lot of effort in building the ecosystem and open source their code.

I'm running tests for an involved math research project, and to my great surprise Lean 4 I love Lean 4, but good luck getting help with it from AI. Today's project-in-progress is digesting their reference manual to fit well within a 200K context window. We'll see if that helps.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#70

Post by feznyng »

gpderetta wrote: post #18
dgfitz wrote: post #13

The only thing worse than a complex codebase is a complex build system. I think CMake is an abomination. “Hey go learn this new language to compile this other language!”

> CMake is an abomination. “Hey go learn this new language to compile this other language!” "go learn this awful new language"

Xmake uses lua if you want to give it a try.
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