|
|
|
| e-Pub |
Previous | 
Home
Section: New Results
The OCaml language and system
The OCaml system
Participants : Damien Doligez, Xavier Leroy, Luc Maranget, David Allsop [Cambridge University] , Florian Angeletti, Alain Frisch [Lexifi] , Jacques Garrigue [University of Nagoya] , Sébastien Hinderer [SED] , Nicolás Ojeda Bär [Lexifi] , Thomas Refis [Jane Street] , Gabriel Scherer [team Parsifal] , Mark Shinwell [Jane Street] , Leo White [Jane Street] , Jeremy Yallop [Cambridge University] .
This year, we released four versions of the OCaml system: versions 4.04.1 and 4.04.2 are minor releases that fix about 16 issues; versions 4.05.0 and 4.06.0 are major releases that introduce some new features, many improvements in usability and performance, and fix about 100 issues. The most important new features are:
-
Character strings are now immutable (read-only) by default. This completes the evolution of OCaml towards immutable strings that started in 2014 with the introduction of a compile-time option to separate text-like read-only strings from array-like read-write byte sequences. This option is now the default, making OCaml programs safer and clearer.
-
Extensions of the “destructive substitution” operator over module signatures (sig with type t := ...) to make it more general and more widely usable.
-
Support for the UTF8 encoding of Unicode characters in strings was improved with the introduction of an escape \u{XXXX} in string literals, and more importantly with a complete overhaul of the OCaml interface for Windows system calls that make them compatible with UTF8-encoded Unicode.
-
An alternate register allocator based on linear scan was added and can be selected to reduce compilation times.
On the organization side, we switched to a deadline-based release cycle whereby a major release occurs at a set date with the features that are ready by that date, instead of waiting for a set of new features to be ready. Releases 4.05.0 and 4.06.0 were produced in this manner at 6-months intervals. Damien Doligez and Gabriel Scherer served as release managers.
Sébastien Hinderer worked on integrating ocamltest , the compiler's test driver he developed last year, in the 4.06 release of OCaml. He migrated a large part of the test suite from the former Makefile-based infrastructure to ocamltest . He also started to rewrite OCaml's build system so that the compiler can be built in parallel as much as its dependencies allow.
We have improved our Continuous Integration infrastructure by taking advantage of Jenkins features such as configuration matrices, adding five new architectures (ARM-64, Fedora, FreeBSD, PPC64-LE, Ubuntu), and upgrading to the latest version of MacOS. Our testing is now done on all of the major architectures that are officially supported by OCaml.
Type-checking the OCaml intermediate languages
Participants : Pierrick Couderc [ENSTA-ParisTech & OCamlPro] , Grégoire Henry [OCamlPro] , Fabrice Le Fessant, Michel Mauny.
This work aims at designing and implementing a consistency checker for the type-annotated abstract syntax trees (TASTs) produced by the OCaml compiler. When presented as inference rules, the different cases of this TAST checker can be read as the rules of the OCaml type system. Proving the correctness of (part of) the checker would prove the soundness of the corresponding part of the OCaml type system. A preliminary report on this work has been presented at the 17th Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming (TFP 2016).
In 2017, Pierrick Couderc formalized the consistency checker, and wrote a Coq proof of its correctness. The dissertation is being written, and Pierrick's Ph.D. defense should take place at the beginning of 2018.
Optimizing OCaml for satisfiability problems
Participants : Sylvain Conchon [LRI, Univ. Paris Sud] , Albin Coquereau [ENSTA-ParisTech] , Mohamed Iguernelala [OCamlPro] , Fabrice Le Fessant, Michel Mauny.
This work aims at improving the performance of the Alt-Ergo SMT solver, implemented in OCaml. For safety reasons and to ease reasoning about its algorithms, the implementation of Alt-Ergo uses as much as possible a functional programming style and persistent data structures, which are sometimes less efficient than imperative style and mutable data. Moreover, some efficient algorithms, such as CDCL SAT solvers, are naturally expressed in an imperative style.
We therefore explored the replacement of Alt-Ergo's default, functional, SAT solver by an imperative CDCL solver. In a first step, we reimplemented a C++ version of miniSAT in OCaml. A comparison of their respective performance showed that the OCaml version is slower and has more cache misses.
In a second step, we studied the use of the imperative miniSAT-like SAT solver in Alt-Ergo. The integration is actually not immediate because of the interaction between this solver and both the theories and the quantifier instantiation engines of Alt-Ergo. In fact, although the default (functional) SAT solver of Alt-Ergo is not as effective as a CDCL solver for reasoning on pure Boolean problems, its smart interaction with theories and instantation engines makes it quite effective in the context of program verification.
Type compatibility checking for dynamically-loaded OCaml data
Participants : Florent Balestrieri [ENSTA-ParisTech] , Michel Mauny.
The SecureOCaml project (FUI 18) aims at enhancing the OCaml language and environment in order to make it more suitable for building secure applications, following the recommendations published by the French ANSSI in 2013. Florent Balestrieri (ENSTA-ParisTech) represents ENSTA-Paristech in this project for 2016 and 2017.
The first year has been dedicated to designing and producing an effective OCaml implementation that checks whether a memory graph – typically the result obtained by unmarshalling some data – is compatible with a given OCaml type, following the algorithm designed by Henry et al. in 2012. Because the algorithm requires a runtime representation of OCaml types, Florent Balestrieri implemented a library for generic programming in OCaml. This library was presented at the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop in 2016 [40]; an extended version of this paper has been submitted [33]. He also implemented a type-checker which, when given a type and a memory graph, checks whether the former could be the type of the latter. In 2017, Florent Balestrieri implemented a prototype type-checker for OCaml bytecode.
Visitors
Participant : François Pottier.
Traversing and transforming abstract syntax trees that involve name binding is notoriously difficult to do in a correct, concise, modular, customizable manner. In 2017, François Pottier addressed this problem in the setting of OCaml by proposing visitor classes as partial, composable descriptions of the operations that one wishes to perform on abstract syntax trees. By combining auto-generated visitor classes (which have no knowledge of binding) and hand-written visitor classes (each of which knows about a specific binding construct, a specific representation of names, and/or a specific operation on abstract syntax trees), a wide range of operations can be defined. A syntax extension for OCaml has been released under the name visitors and this work has been presented at the conference ICFP 2017 [13].
Improvements in Menhir
Participant : François Pottier.
In 2017, François Pottier incorporated several improvements, proposed by Frédéric Bour, to the Menhir parser generator. Many functions were added to Menhir's incremental API, which (at runtime) allows inspecting and updating the parser's state from the outside. A new library, MenhirSdk , was introduced, which (at compile-time) allows inspecting the grammar and the automaton constructed by Menhir. Together, these improvements allow new features to be programmed outside of Menhir; the advanced error recovery mode implemented in the Merlin IDE is an example.
François Pottier also improved the termination test that takes place before parameterized symbols are expanded away. The new test, it is hoped, should reject the grammar if and only if expansion would not terminate. This improves the expressive power of the grammar description language.