Nomadic Labs Research Seminars #4 | Multicore OCaml -- what's coming in 2021

The Nomadic Labs Research Seminars series is dedicated to promoting and discussing the extensive list of Tezos research and development projects.

The series includes live presentations from major research projects happening within the Tezos ecosystem. These hour-long sessions consist of an expert-led presentation for 45 minutes plus a 15 minutes live Q&A between developers, academics, and members of the Tezos community.

This session features a presentation with KC Sivaramakrishnan from the Multicore OCaml Project. The Multicore OCaml Project extends the OCaml language with native support for shared-memory parallelism and concurrent programming through effect handlers. The parallelism support is slated to land first in OCaml followed by the support for effect handlers. A particularly challenging aspect of retrofitting concurrency and parallelism to an industrial-strength language is the need to maintain backwards compatibility not just in terms of the language features but also the performance of existing code. In this talk, KC describes the new concurrency and parallelism features in OCaml, the retrofitting challenges, and what this brings to the Tezos ecosystem.

KC Sivaramakrishnan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT, Madras, India, where he works on the intersection of programming languages and systems. He leads the Multicore OCaml project, which aims to bring native support for concurrency and parallelism to OCaml. He previously developed MultiMLton, a multicore extension of the MLton standard ML compiler and developed lightweight concurrency abstractions for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Before IIT Madras, KC was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and obtained his PhD at Purdue University.