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

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