Real World OCaml

This fast-moving tutorial introduces you to OCaml, an industrial-strength programming language designed for expressiveness, safety, and speed. Through the book’s many examples, you’ll quickly learn how OCaml stands out as a tool for writing fast, succinct, and readable systems code.

Real World OCaml takes you through the concepts of the language at a brisk pace, and then helps you explore the tools and techniques that make OCaml an effective and practical tool. In the book’s third section, you’ll delve deep into the details of the compiler toolchain and OCaml’s simple and efficient runtime system.

• Learn the foundations of the language, such as higher-order functions, algebraic data types, and modules
• Explore advanced features such as functors, first-class modules, and objects
• Leverage Core, a comprehensive general-purpose standard library for OCaml
• Design effective and reusable libraries, making the most of OCaml’s approach to abstraction and modularity
• Tackle practical programming problems from command-line parsing to asynchronous network programming
• Examine profiling and interactive debugging techniques with tools such as GNU gdb

Table of Contents

Part I. Language Concepts

Chapter 1. A Guided Tour

Chapter 2. Variables and Functions

Chapter 3. Lists and Patterns

Chapter 4. Files, Modules, and Programs

Chapter 5. Records

Chapter 6. Variants

Chapter 7. Error Handling

Chapter 8. Imperative Programming

Chapter 9. Functors

Chapter 10. First-Class Modules

Chapter 11. Objects

Chapter 12. Classes

Part II. Tools and Techniques

Chapter 13. Maps and Hash Tables

Chapter 14. Command-Line Parsing

Chapter 15. Handling JSON Data

Chapter 16. Parsing with OCamllex and Menhir

Chapter 17. Data Serialization with S-Expressions

Chapter 18. Concurrent Programming with Async

Part Ill. The Runtime System

Chapter 19. Foreign Function Interface

Chapter 20. Memory Representation of Values

Chapter 21. Understanding the Garbage Collector

Chapter 22. The Compiler Frontend: Parsing and Type Checking

Chapter 23. The Compiler Backend: Bytecode and Native code

About the Authors

Yaron Minsky heads the Technology group at Jane Street, a proprietary trading firm that is the largest industrial user of OCaml. He was responsible for introducing OCaml to the company and for managing the company’s transition to using OCaml for all of its core infrastructure. Today, billions of dollars worth of securities transactions flow each day through those systems. Yaron obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, where he studied distributed systems. Yaron has lectured, blogged and written about OCaml for years, with articles published in Communications of the ACM and the Journal of Functional Programming. He chairs the steering committee of the Commercial Users of Functional Programming, and is a member of the steering committee for the International Conference on Functional Programming.

Anil Madhavapeddy is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, based in the Systems Research Group. He was on the original team that developed the Xen hypervisor, and helped develop an industry-leading cloud management toolstack written entirely in OCaml. This XenServer product has been deployed on hundreds of thousands of physical hosts, and drives critical infrastructure for many Fortune 500 companies. Prior to obtaining his PhD in 2006 from the University of Cambridge, Anil had a diverse background in industry at Network Appliance, NASA and Internet Vision. In addition to professional and academic activities, he is an active member of the open-source development community with the OpenBSD operating system, is co-chair of the Commercial Uses of Functional Programming workshop, and serves on the boards of startup companies such as Ashima Arts where OCaml is extensively used.

Jason Hickey is a Software Engineer at Google Inc. in Mountain View, California. He is part of the team that designs and develops the global computing infrastructure used to support Google services, including the software systems for managing and scheduling massively distributed computing resources. Prior to joining Google, Jason was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Caltech, where his research was in reliable and fault-tolerant computing systems, including programming language design, formal methods, compilers, and new models of distributed computation. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, where he studied programming languages. He is the author of the MetaPRL system, a logical framework for design and analysis of large software systems; OMake, an advanced build system for large software projects. He is the author of the textbook, An Introduction to Objective Caml (unpublished).