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Comment by amirmc | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen any of the work on OCaml multicore? KC's blog posts talk about it e.g. http://kcsrk.info/ocaml/multicore/2015/05/20/effects-multico...

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Is there any kind of timeline for when multicore is actually going to be implemented though? Last thing I saw was some posts from last year saying something about "if everything goes well, it will be in 4.03". As of now, I haven't been able to find anything about it being in 4.03, or anything else about the timeline to implementation. It would be great if it were coming soon, but I'm pretty sure there have been rumblings about it for years now, with nothing more solid than "Coming Soon(tm)".

... moreover, github's charts don't show it to have much of a recent pulse.

https://github.com/ocamllabs/ocaml-multicore/graphs/contribu...

That doesn't mean there isn't work taking place. Here's a recent video where KC talks about it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLnqUlCo055hU46uoONmhYGUbYA...

Edit: and there's also more than one repo out there.

The runtime aspects of the multicore runtime has been pretty stable. Most of the effort currently is going into the algebraic effects extension that is used to map direct-style concurrency into multiple (parallel) cores: https://github.com/ocamllabs/ocaml-effects

> nothing more solid than "Coming Soon(tm)".

That's untrue. There's way more out there than 'coming soon'. There's a repo with code, talks at the OCaml Workshop and blog posts describing it.

This isn't the kind of project where you want to 'move fast and break things'.

I've been wanting to ask one of you about certified compilation for Ocaml. SML has FLINT and CakeML. I know Leroy et al were working on a Mini-ML compiler. Are there any results yet on a certifying compiler for Ocaml, though? Anyone made a lot of progress? Or can it be converted to equivalent ML that can go through something like CakeML?

Last high-assurance work I saw done with Ocaml was Esterel's SCADE generator, which certified object code by hand. They praised the compiler for how much work they avoided w/ minimal mods. They conceivably could've gotten more done if that was automated, though.

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