Why OCaml

Written by hannes
Classified under: overviewbackground
Published: 2016-04-17 (last updated: 2021-11-19)

Programming

For me, programming is fun. I enjoy doing it, every single second. All the way from designing over experimenting to debugging why it does not do what I want. In the end, the computer is dumb and executes only what you (or code from someone else which you rely on) tell it to do.

To abstract from assembly code, which is not portable, programming languages were developed. Different flavoured languages vary in expressive power and static guarantees. Many claim to be general purpose or systems languages; depending on the choices of the language designer and tooling around the language, it is a language which lets you conveniently develop programs in.

A language designer decides on the builtin abstraction mechanisms, each of which is both a burden and a blessing: it might be interfering (which to use? for or while, trait or object), orthogonal (one way to do it), or even synergistic (higher order functions and anonymous functions). Another choice is whether the language includes a type system, and if the developer can cheat on it (by allowing arbitrary type casts, a weak type system). A strong static type system allows a developer to encode invariants, without the need to defer to runtime assertions. Type systems differ in their expressive power (dependent typing are the hot research area at the moment). Tooling depends purely on the community size, natural selection will prevail the useful tools (community size gives inertia to other factors: demand for libraries, package manager, activity on stack overflow, etc.).

Why OCaml?

As already mentioned in other articles here, it is a combination of sufficiently large community, runtime stability and performance, modularity, carefully thought out abstraction mechanisms, maturity (OCaml recently turned 20), and functional features.

The latter is squishy, I'll try to explain it a bit: you define your concrete data types as products (int * int, a tuple of integers), records ({ foo : int ; bar : int } to name fields), sums (type state = Initial | WaitingForKEX | Established, or variants, or tagged union in C). These are called algebraic data types. Whenever you have a state machine, you can encode the state as a variant and use a pattern match to handle the different cases. The compiler checks whether your pattern match is complete (contains a line for each member of the variant). Another important aspect of functional programming is that you can pass functions to other functions (higher-order functions). Also, recursion is fundamental for functional programming: a function calls itself -- combined with a variant type (such as type 'a list = Nil | Cons of 'a * 'a list) it is trivial to show termination.

Side effects make the program interesting, because they communicate with other systems or humans. Side effects should be isolated and explicitly stated (in the type!). Algorithm and protocol implementations should not deal with side effects internally, but leave this to an effectful layer on top of it. The internal pure functions (which receive arguments and return values, no other way of communication) inside preserve referential transparency. Modularity helps to separate the concerns.

The holy grail is declarative programing, write what a program should achieve, not how to achieve it (like often done in an imperative language).

OCaml has a object and class system, which I do not use. OCaml also contains exceptions (and annoyingly the standard library (e.g. List.find) is full of them), which I avoid as well. Libraries should not expose any exception (apart from out of memory, a really exceptional situation). If your code might end up in an error state (common for parsers which process input from the network), return a variant type as value (type ('a, 'b) result = Ok of 'a | Error of 'b). That way, the caller has to handle both the success and failure case explicitly.

Where to start?

The OCaml website contains a variety of tutorials and examples, including introductionary material how to get started with a new library. Editor integration (at least for emacs, vim, and atom) is via merlin available.

A very good starting book is OCaml from the very beginning to learn the functional ideas in OCaml (also its successor More OCaml). Another good book is real world OCaml, though it is focussed around the "core" library (which I do not recommend due to its huge size).

There are programming guidelines, best to re-read on a regular schedule. Daniel wrote guidelines how to handle with errors and results.

Opam is the OCaml package manager. The opam repository contains over 1000 libraries. The quality varies, I personally like the small libraries done by Daniel Bünzli, as well as our nqsb libraries (see mirleft org), notty. A concise library (not much code), including tests, documentation, etc. is hkdf. For testing I currently prefer alcotest. For cooperative tasks, lwt is decent (though it is a bit convoluted by integrating too many features).

I try to stay away from big libraries such as ocamlnet, core, extlib, batteries. When I develop a library I do not want to force anyone into using such large code bases. Since opam is widely used, distributing libraries became easier, thus the trend is towards small libraries (such as astring, ptime, PBKDF, scrypt).

What is needed? This depends on your concrete goal. There are lots of issues in lots of libraries, the MirageOS project also has a list of Pioneer projects which would be useful to have. I personally would like to have a native simple authentication and security layer (SASL) implementation in OCaml soon (amongst other things, such as using an ELF section for data, strtod).

A dashboard for MirageOS is under development, which will hopefully ease tracking of what is being actively developed within MirageOS. Because I'm impatient, I setup an atom feed which watches lots of MirageOS-related repositories.

I hope I gave some insight into OCaml, and why I currently enjoy it. A longer read on applicability of OCaml is our Usenix 2015 paper Not-quite-so-broken TLS: lessons in re-engineering a security protocol specification and implementation. I'm interested in feedback, either via twitter or via eMail.

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