Playing Atari games in OCaml | Hacker News Reader

Playing Atari games in OCaml

janestreet.com

74 pointslnyan13 comments

I first encountered OCaml's PyTorch bindings because apparently they generate a C wrapper around PyTorch's C++ API, and Rust's PyTorch bindings use OCaml's C wrapper. See: https://github.com/LaurentMazare/tch-rs

Oh jane street the OCaml gods. Don't mention you know anything about OCaml in an interview with them unless you want to be grilled to death.

Is this guy paid by a quant firm to implement classical algorithms that are not directly related to their activity, just for the sake of PR? Sign me in!

Laurent Mazare also was a guest in their podcast series [0]. He seems to be part of their research division, which should be the part of the company that produces their most valuable output.

[0]: https://signalsandthreads.com/python-ocaml-and-machine-learn...

If you are using a niche/weird language like OCaml having a bunch of smart people work on porting useful things seems helpfull.

this is about machine learning with Ocaml, it is very strongly related to what Janestreet does.

Arrghhh.... why do I read this as "Writing Atari games in OCaml"? Almost jump out of my chair.

Guess I need a short break....

It isn't impossible - looks like someone is working on restoring m68k support in OCaml[1] which was removed earlier[2].

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2021/12/msg00009.html

[2] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/tree/annot-from-lambda/asmcom...

"The" Atari (the 2600) used essentially a 6502, which is quite a lot earlier and simpler than the 68k.

Ah, I didn't check the article which Atari they refer to. I doubt it's possible to port modern OCaml GC to 6502 then.

Not sure if GC is appropriate for a system with 128 bytes of ram.

A more useful approach would probably be to use a special OCaml program to emit code for the Atari 2600, instead of using the general purpose OCaml compiler to translate OCaml code directly.

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