4 ms·

OCaml compiler is incredibly fast. I wonder how it'd fare with Jane Street's extensions for the borrow checker etc in OxCaml, if it's good enough for their HFT

• antonvs 3mo ago
  I wrote a toy Scheme implementation in OCaml by using the Camplp4 preprocessor. In benchmarks, it was faster than Gambit Scheme, which compiles through C.
  • patrec 3mo ago
    Sounds interesting, have you put it online somewhere?
    • antonvs 3mo ago
      No. I wrote it about 10 years before GitHub existed, and it’s just a toy. All it does is transform core Scheme syntax to Ocaml syntax, converting untyped values in the usual way to a ‘Value’ sum type. I originally thought it would be slower than the faster Scheme compilers, like Gambit, because of how naive it was, but I was surprised to find that on benchmarks, including compute-heavy ones like fractals and I/O heavy ones like web serving, it outperformed Gambit. That’s really a reflection on Ocaml though, I didn’t do anything special. If you asked an LLM to do that today, it could probably produce something better for you pretty quickly.
• djha-skin 3mo ago
  I suspect this "not a systems language" alludes only to OCaml's rather steeper learning curve and until-recently difficulty with multiple threads. I am sure it could roll just fine as a single-threaded compiler language written by a small team, which indeed, it was.