Kodsnack 573 - This is not a toy project, with Leandro Ostera and Emil Privér

Fredrik is joined by Emil Privér and Leandro Ostera for a discussion of the OCaml ecosystem, and making it Saas-ready by building Riot.

First of all: OCaml. What is the thing with the language, and how you might get into it coming from other languages? The OCaml community is nice, interested in getting new people in, and pragmatic. And it has a nice mix of research and industry as well.

Then, Leandro tells us about Riot - an experiment in bringing everything good about the Erlang and Elixir ecosystems into OCaml. The goal? Make OCaml saas-ready. Riot is not 1.0 just yet, but an impressive amount has been built in just five(!) months.

Emil moves the discussion over to the mindset of shipping, and of finding and understanding good ideas in other places and picking them up rather than reinventing the wheel. Leandro highly recommends reading the code of other projects. Read and understand the code and solutions others have written, re-use good ideas and don’t reinvent the wheel more often than you really have to.

Last, but by no means least, shoutouts to some of the great people building the OCaml community, and a bit about Emil’s project DBCaml.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

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Links

Emil

Leo

Leo on Twitch

Previous Kodsnack appearances by Emil

Riot

Sinatra

Backbone.js

Ember.js

Angularjs

React

Erlang

Tarides - where Leandro currently works

OCaml

Robin Milner - designer of ML

Caml

Javacaml

F#

Imperative programming

Object-oriented programming

Pure functions and side effects

Monads

The OCaml compiler

Reason - the language built by Jordan Walke, the creator of React

Standard ML

React was prototyped in Standard ML

Melange - OCaml compiler backend producing Javascript

OCaml by example

The OCaml Discord

The Reason Discord

Rescript

Jane street

High-frequency trading

The Dune build system

Erlang process trees

Caramel - earlier experiment of Leandro’s

Louis Pilfold

Gleam

Algebraic effects

Continuations

Pool - Emil’s project

Gluon

Bytestring

Atacama - connection pool inspired by Thousand island

Nomad - inspired by Bandit

Trail - middleware inspired by Plug

Sidewinder - Livewire-like

Saas - software as a service

DBCaml

Johan Öbrink

Ecto

Mint tea - inspired by Bubble tea

Autobahn|Testsuite - test suite for specification compliance

Serde - Rust and OCaml serialization framework

S-expressions

TOML

Dillon Mulroy

Metame - community kindness pillar

welltypedwitch

Sabine maintains ocaml.org

OCaml playground

OCaml cookbook - in beta, sort of

teej_dv

ocaml.org

Pool party

Drizzle

SQLX

SQL Join types (left, inner, and so on)

dbca.ml

internet.bs

The Caravan

Essentials of compilation

Reading rainbow

Titles

Few people can have a massive impact

Impact has been an important thing for me

It’s a language out there

A very long lineage of thinking about programming languages

Programs that never fail

The functional version of Rust

Melange is amazing

This is not a toy project

Yes, constraints!

Wonders in community growth

Arrow pointing toward growth

Programs that don’t crash

A very different schoold of reliability

Invert the arrow

Very easy on the whiteboard

Multicore for free

An entire stack from scratch

Built for the builders

A massive tree of things

Make OCaml saas-ready

Leo is a shipper

Standing on the shoulders of many, many giants

Learn from other people

I exude OCaml these days

Sitting down and building against the spec

You just give it something

Your own inner join

We build everything in public

The gospel of the dunes