The Essence of Functional Programming

"OCaml is fundamentally a functional programming language and the use of functions instead of objects often leads to shorter and clearer code. Indeed, many of the benefits of functional programming are already known to OO programmers in the form of design patterns..."

To read the rest of this article and more, subscribe to The OCaml Journal today.

High-performance vector graphics update

We just released a new version of Smoke, including a free byte-code edition.

Smoke is a high-performance cross-platform 2D vector graphics library written entirely in OCaml that renders using OpenGL to exploit hardware acceleration. Version 2.01 adds:

• OCaml 3.10 compatibility
• Vector text using the Computer Modern fonts (see demo3.ml)

We are working towards typesetting, GUIs and a vector graphics replacement for the OCaml top-level...

How to Leverage Pattern Matching

The jaw-droppingly great OCaml Journal published its first article, covering pattern matching with a detailed case study on term rewriting:

"Compared to conventional programming languages, OCaml takes dynamic dispatch to a whole new level using an approach called pattern matching. This article guides the reader through the fundamental concepts that underpin pattern matching before providing some examples demonstrating the power of pattern matching in general programming..."

To read the rest of this article and more, subscribe to The OCaml Journal today!

OCaml top-level compiling to native code

Alain Frisch recently announced on the OCaml mailing list that he has successfully added support for dynamic linking of native-code compiled OCaml and, in particular, has used this to make OCaml's interactive top-level compile to native code.

This is a tremendous achievement and greatly improves the performance of interactive OCaml, making it an even better technical computing environment.

The OCaml Journal

We just released a subscription journal for articles about the OCaml programming language, starting with an issue for beginners:

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_journal/

Check back here for article abstracts as they're published!

OCaml + Concurrency = JoCaml

The pioneering researchers at INRIA pushed the boundaries of computer programming forward again this week by announcing the first public release of their next-generation concurrent programming language JoCaml.

The JoCaml language draws upon the success of INRIA's OCaml language by augmenting it with a native implementation of the Join calculus to provide a robust mechanism for exploiting concurrency in OCaml programs.

The JoCaml authors present a beautiful distributed ray tracer among their examples, which is derived from our own work.

Combined with core OCaml developments such as a completely revamped camlp4 implementation and the recent surge in new users, the future looks bright for OCaml!