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OCaml Users Meeting 2011

Date: Friday 15th April 2011 Location: Telecom ParisTech, Paris, France

This event will take place in Paris. The venue is in Telecom ParisTech (former ENST, the place of the first OCaml Meeting).

The OCaml Meeting is the a place where OCaml enthusiasts can meet and discuss various subjects ranging from webservers to parser/lexer of natural languages in OCaml. Most of the topics focus on practical OCaml subjects (libraries or applications) but broadening the field is allowed.

The meeting is kindly sponsored by the CAML consortium, so the lunch and the coffee breaks are free.

Schedule

Video Playlist

  • 09:30–09:45: OCamlCore.org news and projects by Sylvain Le Gall
  • 09:45–10:15: js_of_ocaml: Compiling Ocaml bytecode to Javascript, by Jérôme Vouillon
  • 10:15–10:45: OCAPIC: programming PIC microcontrollers with Objective Caml
  • 10:45–11:15: Developing Frama-C Plug-ins in OCaml, by Julien Signoles
  • 11:30–12:00: Client/server Web applications with Eliom, by Vincent Balat
  • 12:00–12:30: MirageOS, by Anil Madhavapeddy
  • 12:30–13:00: Using OCaml to generate 198,278 lines of C, by Richard Jones
  • 14:30–15:30: OCaml annual report by Xavier Leroy
  • 15:30–16:00: JoCaml, by Luc Maranget
  • 16:30–17:00: The Eternal Solution for Memoisation: Ephemerons, by François Bobot
  • 17:00–17:30: OASIS-DB: a CPAN for OCaml, by Sylvain Le Gall
  • 17:30–18:00: Ideas for a Modern OCaml Web Portal by Ashish Agarwal
  • 18:00–19:00: Demonstration and discussion time

Intro (bits from OCamlCore.org)

Slides | Video

The core Caml system: status report and challenges, by Xavier Leroy

Xavier Leroy, senior research scientist at INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, leads the development team for the core Caml system.

This talk will briefly review ongoing work on the core Caml system and discuss some medium to long-term challenges, both technical and organizational.

Slides | Video

OASIS-DB: a CPAN for OCaml, by Sylvain Le Gall

OASIS-DB is a set of tools and a webserver that helps to manage OASIS enabled softwares and libraries to live together. It uses OASIS data to build a database and to understand the link between each packages. It also provides a backup site for tarball. The webserver is built on top of Ocsigen and Lwt.

This talk will show the architecture of OASIS and OASIS-DB and demonstrate some of its low paperwork publication scheme: upload your tarball to the website and let all others download, compile and install it using only 2 commands.

Sylvain Le Gall is an OCaml consultant working at OCamlCore SARL.

Website | Slides | Video

js_of_ocaml: Compiling Ocaml bytecode to Javascript, by Jérôme Vouillon

Js_of_ocaml is a compiler of OCaml bytecode to Javascript. It makes it possible to run Ocaml programs in a Web browser. Its key features are the following:

  • The whole language, and most of the standard library are supported.
  • The generated code runs very fast
  • The compiler is easy to install: it only depends on Findlib and Lwt.
  • The generated code is independent of Eliom and the Ocsigen server. You can use it with any Web server.
  • You can use a standard installation of OCaml to compile your programs. In particular, you do not have to recompile a library to use it with Js_of_ocaml. You just have to link your program with a specific library to interface with the browser APIs.
  • Binding Javascript libraries is very easy

In this talk we will show you the main features and some examples.

Jérôme Vouillon is a computer science researcher at PPS and IRILL (CNRS), member of the Ocsigen team.

Video

Client/server Web applications with Eliom, by Vincent Balat

Ocsigen Eliom is an extension for the Web server of the Ocsigen project allowing to write Web applications in Ocaml. Eliom 1 made very easy to write reliable Web sites where pages are computed on server side. Thanks to the js_of_ocaml compiler, it is now possible to run OCaml programs in a browser. Eliom 2.0, that will be released in very few weeks, will make possible to mix both, and write client/server Web applications fully in OCaml, in very few lines of code. A client/server program is written as a single OCaml application. Eliom handles the communication between the client and the server automatically in both directions, and your application is fully integrated in your Web site, that is: you keep the usual Web interaction (with links, forms, and URLs) during the execution of the client side program!

In this talk I will show how to write an example application.

Vincent Balat is a computer science researcher at PPS and IRILL (Université Paris Diderot/INRIA), member of the Ocsigen team.

Video

Using OCaml to generate 198,278 lines of C, by Richard Jones

We use OCaml in the libguestfs project to generate large amounts of boilerplate C code. This short talk (10 mins) will explain what the problem that existing projects such as libvirt suffered from and how we successfully solved it, and what difficulties remain.

Video

MirageOS, by Anil Madhavapeddy

Mirage is an open-source operating system for constructing secure, high-performance, reliable network applications across a variety of cloud computing platforms. OCaml code can be developed on a normal OS such as Linux and then compiled into a fully-standalone, specialised OS kernel that runs under the Xen hypervisor (and in the future, KVM or VMWare). Mirage is based around the OCaml language, with syntax extensions and libraries that are easy to use during development, and map directly into operating system constructs when being compiled for production deployment.

Slides | Video

Developing Frama-C Plug-ins in OCaml, by Julien Signoles

Frama-C is an extensible and collaborative platform dedicated to source-code analysis of C software. It is fully developed in OCaml. Any OCaml developer can extend the platform with a new plug-in in order to add new analyzers or functionalities. This talk will give a survey of Frama-C and show how to implement a new plug-in in OCaml.

Slides | Video

JoCaml, by Luc Maranget

JoCaml is an extension of Objective Caml for concurrent and distributed programming. The last released version of JoCaml features an extended library intended to facilitate the programming of master/slave distributed applications aware of failures and machine heterogeneity, and the control of forked programs. I'll illustrate this new functionalities by the means of simple examples, where JoCaml acts as a coordination language.

Slides | Video

The Eternal Solution for Memoisation: Ephemerons, by François Bobot

Memoization is a powerful tool for writing neat programs but yet efficient ones. It stores previous function results for latter use. To avoid memory leaks, a perfect memoization technique would let a function result be reclaimed as soon as the function argument is reclaimed. It can be proved that a perfect solution cannot be implemented with the current Ocaml runtime. We propose a modification to the Ocaml runtime which provides Hayes's ephemerons. It is then possible to implement perfect memoization tables.

Slides | Video

OCAPIC: programming PIC microcontrollers with Objective Caml, by Benoît Vaugon and Philippe Wang

OCAPIC provides means to program PIC microcontrollers with Objective Caml (with no language restrictions, only library changes). Very tight PIC µC resources (only 4KB of volatile memory, at most) made this task a great challenge that has been successfully addressed.

OCAPIC includes OCamlClean, a tool to reduce bytecode binaries by eliminating dead code (works with any binary produced by compiler ocamlc).

OCAPIC's website | Slides | Video

Ideas for a Modern OCaml Web Portal by Ashish Agarwal

OCaml lacks the web presence it deserves. The purpose of this talk is to foster discussion of what we as a community want from a modern web portal for OCaml, and how we can begin implementing it. The discussion will be guided by a presentation covering: desired content and design, technological implementation choices, and management of such an effort.

Ashish Agarwal is a Research Scientist at New York University, where he uses OCaml to build bioinformatics software.

Slides | Video

List of participants

  1. Adrien Guatto, UPMC & LIENS
  2. Alain Frisch, LexiFi
  3. Alessandro Strada
  4. Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge
  5. Anton Kolotaev, INRIA
  6. Ashish Agarwal, New York University
  7. Benjamin Canou, UPMC
  8. Benoît Vaugon, Université Pierre et Marie Curie
  9. Boris Yakobowski, CEA LIST
  10. Christophe Troestler, Université de Mons
  11. Cécile Stentzel, INRIA
  12. Cédric Pasteur, LIENS
  13. Damien Doligez, INRIA
  14. Dana Xu, INRIA
  15. Daniel Bünzli
  16. Dario Teixeir
  17. David Teller, MLstate
  18. Dmitry Bely
  19. Esther Baruk, Université Paris 7 / LexiFi
  20. Fabrice Le Fessant, INRIA -- OCamlPro
  21. François Bobot, Paris XI -- INRIA
  22. Gabriel de Perthuis
  23. Gabriel Kerneis, Laboratoire PPS, Paris
  24. Grégoire Henry, IRILL
  25. Jaap Boender, IRILL
  26. Jacques Le Normand, LexiFi
  27. Jean-Vincent Loddo, LIPN, Université Paris 13
  28. Jonathan Derque
  29. Jonathan Protzenko
  30. Julien Signoles, CEA LIST
  31. Jérémie Dimino
  32. Kaustuv Chaudhuri, INRIA
  33. Kim Nguyen, LRI, Université Paris-Sud 11
  34. Laurent Carrié, Thales
  35. Leonard Gerard, Université Paris-Sud 11 / LIENS
  36. Louis Mandel, Université Paris-Sud 11
  37. Luc Maranget, INRIA
  38. Luca Saiu, LIPN, Université Paris 13
  39. Markus Weißmann, TUM
  40. Mathias Kende, PPS
  41. Mehdi Dogguy
  42. Meriem Zidouni, Inria rocquencourt
  43. Mikolaj Konarski, funktory.com
  44. Nicolas Pouillard, INRIA
  45. Olivier Andrieu, Esterel Technologies
  46. Paolo Donadeo, Studio Associato 4Sigma
  47. Paolo Herms, CEA LIST — INRIA
  48. Philippe Cantin
  49. Philippe Veber, INRA
  50. Philippe Wang, Université Pierre et Marie Curie / LIP6
  51. Pierre Chambart, Irill
  52. Raphael Proust, ENS Cachan (student)
  53. Richard Jones, Red Hat
  54. Roberto Di Cosmo, IRILL
  55. Samuel Mimram, CEA, LIST
  56. Stéphane Glondu
  57. Sylvain Le Gall, OCamlCore SARL
  58. Thomas Gazagnaire, INRIA / OcamlPro
  59. Tiphaine Turpin
  60. Victor Nicollet, RunOrg
  61. Vincent Balat, IRILL Université Paris Diderot
  62. Vivien Ravet, LIP6
  63. Xavier Leroy, INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt
  64. Yann Regis-Gianas, PPS - Paris 7 - INRIA pi.r2

Hacking day

Like last year, a Hacking day ( or week-end if you are motivated enough ) will be organised. It will hosted by IRILL, http://www.irill.org/about/access. Access to the building is restricted, more information will be given at the meeting.

For more information, contact Pierre Chambart (chambart AT crans.org) which is kindly organizing this hacking day.

Organization team

Team list:

  • Sylvain Le Gall
  • Dario Teixeira who has contributed a large part of the registration website
  • Pierre Chambart (chambart AT crans.org) for the hacking day
  • Paolo Herms who will handle the welcome stand