Here is a description of OCaml usage at Jane Street : https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036
ocaml.org have a list of users: http://ocaml.org/companies.html
Some "big" companies in the list: Facebook, Citrix, Dassault Système.
Real World OCaml
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Re: Real World OCaml
#12Where is OCaml's place in the current world? I find it interesting as it seems to generate little "buzz", but has two new books this year, and is a pre-cursor to another functional language that itself seems to be gaining traction, and is yet produced my Microsoft: F# My observational / untested impression is OCaml seems to be more practical, and maybe a little easier to transition to for someone like me who uses mos…
It's extremely practical, and used in virtualization in the real world. Virt-* tools, Xen.
Re: Real World OCaml
#13Where is OCaml's place in the current world? I find it interesting as it seems to generate little "buzz", but has two new books this year, and is a pre-cursor to another functional language that itself seems to be gaining traction, and is yet produced my Microsoft: F# My observational / untested impression is OCaml seems to be more practical, and maybe a little easier to transition to for someone like me who uses mos…
If you want to use a functional language on Unix, _and_ have a type system, _and_ avoid JVM/.Net then you don't have many choices.
There is Haskell of course, but it is lazy by default, which makes it harder to reason about how your program will execute, and how much space it'll use.
Rust is something interesting to keep an eye on, but AFAIK it is not ready yet for production use.
Hence I prefer OCaml.
Re: Real World OCaml
#14Debian describes OCaml as follows: Objective Caml (OCaml) is an implementation of the ML language, based on the Caml Light dialect extended with a complete class-based object system and a powerful module system in the style of Standard ML. OCaml comprises two compilers. One generates bytecode which is then interpreted by a C program. This compiler runs quickly, generates compact code with moderate memory requirements…
It is not available on all arches though. Although in practices the arches that lack a native OCaml compiler don't matter. In RHEL we ship OCaml natively for everything except S/390 and AArch64. AArch64 will be important, but since hardware doesn't exist in a form you can buy for servers, we're happy to wait for upstream to implement this. We'll probably help them out with hardware too. Edit: We maintain our own PPC6…
Xavier Leroy committed experimental native AArch64 support to OCaml trunk over the summer. I'm planning to add it to the OPAM package testing pool as soon as I get my hands on some Calxeda (or other) hardware.
Re: Real World OCaml
#15For anyone curious to hear more and is at QCon SF today, I'll be speaking about a new library operating system we've been building in OCaml for the past few years. The slot is in a couple of hours at 1030 PST.
qcon link: http://qconsf.com/presentation/my-other-internet-mirage my slides: http://decks.openmirage.org/qcon13/
Re: Real World OCaml
#16Also interesting read,
"Unix system programming in OCaml", http://ocamlunix.forge.ocamlcore.org/
Re: Real World OCaml
#17In my progression of Haskell-OCaml-Common Lisp-Clojure-Scala, I remember OCaml having odd edge cases, modules of functors or some such that didn't really help me in solving real world problems (this was 2007-2008 so my memory could be off). I'm currently a fan of Scala, which has all the functional and Algebraic Data Type goodness I remember from OCaml but is more "practical", more companies and projects are using it, plus I work in the JVM ecosystem. Any reason to go to OCaml now instead of Scala?
Re: Real World OCaml
#18Debian describes OCaml as follows: Objective Caml (OCaml) is an implementation of the ML language, based on the Caml Light dialect extended with a complete class-based object system and a powerful module system in the style of Standard ML. OCaml comprises two compilers. One generates bytecode which is then interpreted by a C program. This compiler runs quickly, generates compact code with moderate memory requirements…
It is not available on all arches though. Although in practices the arches that lack a native OCaml compiler don't matter. In RHEL we ship OCaml natively for everything except S/390 and AArch64. AArch64 will be important, but since hardware doesn't exist in a form you can buy for servers, we're happy to wait for upstream to implement this. We'll probably help them out with hardware too. Edit: We maintain our own PPC6…
We actively use/used OCaml in production on SPARC/Solaris, POWER/AIX, HP-UX/IA64. (The optimized compiler wouldn't build on AIX.)
Re: Real World OCaml
#19[deleted]
>(Though to my understanding, Jane Street capital, a proprietary trading firm, is the only company that uses this language in real world applications)
Re: Real World OCaml
#20Where is OCaml's place in the current world? I find it interesting as it seems to generate little "buzz", but has two new books this year, and is a pre-cursor to another functional language that itself seems to be gaining traction, and is yet produced my Microsoft: F# My observational / untested impression is OCaml seems to be more practical, and maybe a little easier to transition to for someone like me who uses mos…
It's a great teaching tool (so in a university/academic setting at the very least)