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I am the author of the talk here o/. This talk is a _subjective_ take on how the OCaml programming language evolves, based on my observations over the last 10

by kcsrk 1y ago

I am the author of the talk here o/. This talk is a _subjective_ take on how the OCaml programming language evolves, based on my observations over the last 10 years I've been involved with it. My aim/hope is to demystify the compiler development process and the tradeoffs involved and encourage more developers to take a shot at contributing to the OCaml compiler. Happy to answer questions, but also, more importantly, hear your comments and criticisms around the compiler development process, ideas to make it more approachable, etc.

hoppp 1y ago
Is there a video for the talk? The link is just pdf and I would love to hear it
ofrzeta 1y ago
To be honest the story about the two closed PRs for dynamic arrays doesn't really inspire contributions :)
- kcsrk 1y ago
  You are right that the dynamic arrays story does not read like a straightforward “how to inspire contributions.” But part of what I wanted to do in the talk was to show things as they actually unfolded. In OCaml compiler development, there is a very strong emphasis on correctness and long-term stability. That can make contributions, especially to core language features, feel harder than they might in faster-moving ecosystems. The dynamic arrays case is a good illustration. What began as a small PR grew into years of design iterations, debates about representation, performance, and multicore safety, and eventually a couple of thousand lines of code and more than 500 comments before it landed. From one perspective, that looks discouraging. From another, it shows the weight we place on getting things right, because once a feature ships, it is very hard to undo. That tension, between wanting to be open and encouraging contributions but also needing to protect stability, is something I think we should be talking about openly. My hope is that by making the process more visible we can demystify it and help contributors understand not just what happened, but why.
  - octachron 1y ago
    A point that I find missing in the timeline for dynamic array is that there have been implementation for dynamic arrays available in libraries for more than twenty years. However, none of the authors of those libraries were really happy with their own implementation because those implementations had to choose between performance, API usability or thread safety. When I closed the student pull request (which was a naive implementation with no unsafe features), it was with the idea that it was unfair to expect a beginner use to solve those issues. The subsequent iterations explored different part of the design space before the final iteration which converged to safely using unsafe language features to reach a new local API optimum.
  - sidkshatriya 1y ago
    I think this is the tension in most software. If you want to have excellent and correct software it will take time. And if you want more features with a "fix as you go approach" you will often have huge technical debt and get saddled with poor interfaces, often forever. But, I think OCaml errs too much on the side of getting it right the first time. The result is that state of the art keeps moving far ahead. By the time OCaml "catches up" the field of programming languages has moved far ahead. So OCaml always remains the Jack of all trades and the master of none (IMHO). I like the direction OxCaml is taking. But the problem is that no one has another 10 years to see its learnings get folded back into OCaml. There is a real chance that OxCaml may diverge so much that it becomes impractical to merge it into OCaml. Flambda2 is another great piece of software that may also take a long time to come into OCaml proper. So I feel that things need to be "speeded up" if OCaml has to become a bigger ecosystem. You can see that some big projects are moving away from OCaml -- facebook for instance used to have their python typechecker in OCaml. Their new one, pyrefly is in Rust. This could be an isolated story, no doubt.
    - sidkshatriya 1y ago
      Now OCaml values adding features carefully to the language so that there is no future regret. But being slow and conservative has _not_ minimized regret. The "O" in OCaml i.e. Objects (and Classes) is almost ignored nowadays. Janestreet, a large industrial user seems to be actively against using the "O" part of OCaml. So here we have gotten the worst of both worlds -- a language that is evolving slowly and a language that has large features that are almost soft discouraged. My primary language is Rust and not OCaml (mostly dabble in OCaml) so I may not fully know what I'm talking about when it comes to OCaml.
- klodolph 1y ago
  Maybe what I read here is “this is how contributions go”… Get the API right first. Make sure it’s correct, safe, and useful. Iterate on the performance afterwards. IMO, a lot of contributions should take this shape.
  - kcsrk 1y ago
    It is often hard to see the shape of these things before a serious PR attempt is made. Each of the PRs reveals more of the shape of the problem being solved. Hard to skip them in practice, especially for new contributors.
- aseipp 1y ago
  I think it's just the nature of the beast, in this case. Serious "industrial" implementations of a programming language might stick around for a long time, and breaking things a lot can mar the appeal; getting it right the first time pays off in that case. I think the acceptance threshold can be much lower in other kinds of tooling. "It is what it is", so to speak.
  - Quekid5 1y ago
    Add a sane deprecation process and this is much less of an issue -- see e.g. the Java language. Sure, it's not ideal to have multiple implementations of the 'same' data structure (if a better way is found, say)... but at least you aren't stalling everything and causing API interop issues for years and years.
rwmj 1y ago
I'm at a conference at the moment so can't give a lengthy answer, but I'm the maintainer of virt-v2v, one large open source OCaml project (large if you include all the dependencies) which generates actual multi-millions in annual revenue, but is often overlooked in all this discussion of the OCaml ecosystem. Glad to talk by email some time. [BTW we currently have open positions for two developers]
- lambda_foo 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing, I had no idea about this project. Could you share some more details about where this project is used? Links to those open positions for OCaml developers would be interesting too, not for myself :-)
  - rwmj 1y ago
    For converting VMs that run on VMware to run on KVM. After Broadcom purchased VMware a couple of years ago & raised prices (in some cases up to 10x), lots and lots of businesses are desperate to leave VMware. The open positions can be found on the Red Hat website if you search roles for "virt-v2v".
    - yawaramin 1y ago
      Found this one: https://redhat.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/jobs/details/Principal-Software-Engineer-Red-Hat-Enterprise-Linux-Core-Virtualization-C-C--_R-049524-1?q=%27virt-v2v%27 https://redhat.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/jobs/details/Prin... No mention of OCaml though.
      - rwmj 1y ago
        Right, we don't mention it in the advert because doing so draws in a certain type of academic person that we don't want to hire. Also because the majority of the code is actually in other programming languages, and we can easily train up (eg.) an ace C coder in OCaml if we need to.
alabhyajindal 1y ago
This is not a direct comment on compiler development but on industrial projects in general: how do you begin contributing to something that is so large? What should a beginner in compiler development, someone who has written a few compilers of their own, do to get involved in a project such as OCaml? I understand this issue is not specific to compilers, but is faced by any sufficiently large project. Still, I think it's an important issue. I believe there are many resources for people to get up and running in a field but not enough for them to make the next jump into industrial projects.
- rwmj 1y ago
  (I think this advice applies to most large open source projects) Make sure you have installed and are using the software. Ideally you'd have an ongoing interest in it because it's something you use regularly (whether personally or for work). Read first, especially the documentation, guidelines to contributing, mailing lists / Github issues / however else the upstream maintainers engage with each other. Start small. Actually a great place is just to go and fix spelling mistakes and typos in documentation, code, comments, etc. Follow the guidelines for contributing to the letter, even if they appear over-complicated at first. After you've engaged with small patches, build up. Look through their issues and (since you're using the software every day) find something that is an "itch" that you want to "scratch", and attempt to fix that. I don't really need to go further because either at some point in this process you'll have become discouraged (for good or bad reasons), or you'll have found your community and will want to contribute more and more.
  - nitnelave 1y ago
    Also, of course, talk to people. Pitch your PR idea before writing it, so you can avoid hearing "oh, there's a much simpler way" or "we can never merge this approach because of X"
  - alabhyajindal 1y ago
    Thank you - I appreciate it!

by kcsrk 1y ago

hoppp 1y ago

Is there a video for the talk? The link is just pdf and I would love to hear it

ofrzeta 1y ago

To be honest the story about the two closed PRs for dynamic arrays doesn't really inspire contributions :)

kcsrk 1y ago
You are right that the dynamic arrays story does not read like a straightforward “how to inspire contributions.” But part of what I wanted to do in the talk was to show things as they actually unfolded. In OCaml compiler development, there is a very strong emphasis on correctness and long-term stability. That can make contributions, especially to core language features, feel harder than they might in faster-moving ecosystems. The dynamic arrays case is a good illustration. What began as a small PR grew into years of design iterations, debates about representation, performance, and multicore safety, and eventually a couple of thousand lines of code and more than 500 comments before it landed. From one perspective, that looks discouraging. From another, it shows the weight we place on getting things right, because once a feature ships, it is very hard to undo. That tension, between wanting to be open and encouraging contributions but also needing to protect stability, is something I think we should be talking about openly. My hope is that by making the process more visible we can demystify it and help contributors understand not just what happened, but why.
- octachron 1y ago
  A point that I find missing in the timeline for dynamic array is that there have been implementation for dynamic arrays available in libraries for more than twenty years. However, none of the authors of those libraries were really happy with their own implementation because those implementations had to choose between performance, API usability or thread safety. When I closed the student pull request (which was a naive implementation with no unsafe features), it was with the idea that it was unfair to expect a beginner use to solve those issues. The subsequent iterations explored different part of the design space before the final iteration which converged to safely using unsafe language features to reach a new local API optimum.
- sidkshatriya 1y ago
  I think this is the tension in most software. If you want to have excellent and correct software it will take time. And if you want more features with a "fix as you go approach" you will often have huge technical debt and get saddled with poor interfaces, often forever. But, I think OCaml errs too much on the side of getting it right the first time. The result is that state of the art keeps moving far ahead. By the time OCaml "catches up" the field of programming languages has moved far ahead. So OCaml always remains the Jack of all trades and the master of none (IMHO). I like the direction OxCaml is taking. But the problem is that no one has another 10 years to see its learnings get folded back into OCaml. There is a real chance that OxCaml may diverge so much that it becomes impractical to merge it into OCaml. Flambda2 is another great piece of software that may also take a long time to come into OCaml proper. So I feel that things need to be "speeded up" if OCaml has to become a bigger ecosystem. You can see that some big projects are moving away from OCaml -- facebook for instance used to have their python typechecker in OCaml. Their new one, pyrefly is in Rust. This could be an isolated story, no doubt.
  - sidkshatriya 1y ago
    Now OCaml values adding features carefully to the language so that there is no future regret. But being slow and conservative has _not_ minimized regret. The "O" in OCaml i.e. Objects (and Classes) is almost ignored nowadays. Janestreet, a large industrial user seems to be actively against using the "O" part of OCaml. So here we have gotten the worst of both worlds -- a language that is evolving slowly and a language that has large features that are almost soft discouraged. My primary language is Rust and not OCaml (mostly dabble in OCaml) so I may not fully know what I'm talking about when it comes to OCaml.
klodolph 1y ago
Maybe what I read here is “this is how contributions go”… Get the API right first. Make sure it’s correct, safe, and useful. Iterate on the performance afterwards. IMO, a lot of contributions should take this shape.
- kcsrk 1y ago
  It is often hard to see the shape of these things before a serious PR attempt is made. Each of the PRs reveals more of the shape of the problem being solved. Hard to skip them in practice, especially for new contributors.
aseipp 1y ago
I think it's just the nature of the beast, in this case. Serious "industrial" implementations of a programming language might stick around for a long time, and breaking things a lot can mar the appeal; getting it right the first time pays off in that case. I think the acceptance threshold can be much lower in other kinds of tooling. "It is what it is", so to speak.
- Quekid5 1y ago
  Add a sane deprecation process and this is much less of an issue -- see e.g. the Java language. Sure, it's not ideal to have multiple implementations of the 'same' data structure (if a better way is found, say)... but at least you aren't stalling everything and causing API interop issues for years and years.

rwmj 1y ago

I'm at a conference at the moment so can't give a lengthy answer, but I'm the maintainer of virt-v2v, one large open source OCaml project (large if you include all the dependencies) which generates actual multi-millions in annual revenue, but is often overlooked in all this discussion of the OCaml ecosystem. Glad to talk by email some time. [BTW we currently have open positions for two developers]

lambda_foo 1y ago
Thanks for sharing, I had no idea about this project. Could you share some more details about where this project is used? Links to those open positions for OCaml developers would be interesting too, not for myself :-)
- rwmj 1y ago
  For converting VMs that run on VMware to run on KVM. After Broadcom purchased VMware a couple of years ago & raised prices (in some cases up to 10x), lots and lots of businesses are desperate to leave VMware. The open positions can be found on the Red Hat website if you search roles for "virt-v2v".
  - yawaramin 1y ago
    Found this one: https://redhat.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/jobs/details/Principal-Software-Engineer-Red-Hat-Enterprise-Linux-Core-Virtualization-C-C--_R-049524-1?q=%27virt-v2v%27 https://redhat.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/jobs/details/Prin... No mention of OCaml though.
    - rwmj 1y ago
      Right, we don't mention it in the advert because doing so draws in a certain type of academic person that we don't want to hire. Also because the majority of the code is actually in other programming languages, and we can easily train up (eg.) an ace C coder in OCaml if we need to.

alabhyajindal 1y ago

This is not a direct comment on compiler development but on industrial projects in general: how do you begin contributing to something that is so large? What should a beginner in compiler development, someone who has written a few compilers of their own, do to get involved in a project such as OCaml? I understand this issue is not specific to compilers, but is faced by any sufficiently large project. Still, I think it's an important issue. I believe there are many resources for people to get up and running in a field but not enough for them to make the next jump into industrial projects.

rwmj 1y ago
(I think this advice applies to most large open source projects) Make sure you have installed and are using the software. Ideally you'd have an ongoing interest in it because it's something you use regularly (whether personally or for work). Read first, especially the documentation, guidelines to contributing, mailing lists / Github issues / however else the upstream maintainers engage with each other. Start small. Actually a great place is just to go and fix spelling mistakes and typos in documentation, code, comments, etc. Follow the guidelines for contributing to the letter, even if they appear over-complicated at first. After you've engaged with small patches, build up. Look through their issues and (since you're using the software every day) find something that is an "itch" that you want to "scratch", and attempt to fix that. I don't really need to go further because either at some point in this process you'll have become discouraged (for good or bad reasons), or you'll have found your community and will want to contribute more and more.
- nitnelave 1y ago
  Also, of course, talk to people. Pitch your PR idea before writing it, so you can avoid hearing "oh, there's a much simpler way" or "we can never merge this approach because of X"
- alabhyajindal 1y ago
  Thank you - I appreciate it!