Erlang, OCaml, same thing 🤷

Ever wondered what type-safe, massively concurrent functional programming could look like? Join me on a journey from Erlang to OCaml and back again.

We’ll learn about Caramel 🍬 – an experiment in bringing type-safety for the Erlang VM. Caramel was born out of the question: why is Erlang hard to type? – and as it turns out, it is not! If you restrict it enough. So much so that what you end up with is…OCaml?

On the flip side, the new algebraic effects and multicore capabilities of OCaml 5 open the possibility of new execution models. How far could we take them? Could we inject Erlang’s famed concurrency model into OCaml?

Riot 🌪️ is an actor-model runtime for OCaml 5 that brings multi-core scheduling and lightweight processes, communicating via message passing.

Key Takeaways

• Learn more about how type safety and supervision trees make for the ultimate reliability stack
• Understand the convergence of Erlang and OCaml
• Get started writing Type-safe actor systems in OCaml with Riot

Leandro Ostera

Bluesky: @leostera.bsky.social
Fediverse: @leostera@mas.to
Twitter: @leostera

Leandro is a neurodivergent Latin engineer, writer, leader and founder, living in Sweden. In his 10+ years in the industry he’s worked at companies like Klarna, Spotify, Walnut, and several startups. In their spare time, Leandro enjoys building compilers and doing street photography.