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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• 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

• 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