Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Grants with Industry

The OCaml Software Foundation

Participants : Damien Doligez, Xavier Leroy.

The OCaml Software Foundation (OCSF),(http://ocaml-sf.org/) established in 2018 under the umbrella of the Inria Foundation, aims to promote, protect, and advance the OCaml programming language and its ecosystem, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of OCaml users.

Damien Doligez and Xavier Leroy serve as advisors on the foundation's Executive Committee.

We receive substantial basic funding from the OCaml Software Foundation in order to support research activity related to OCaml.

Funding from Nomadic Labs

Nomadic Labs, a Paris-based company, has implemented the Tezos blockchain and cryptocurrency entirely in OCaml. This year, Nomadic Labs and Inria have signed a framework agreement (“contrat-cadre”) that allows Nomadic Labs to fund multiple research efforts carried out by Inria groups. Within this framework, we have received three 3-year grants:

• “Évolution d'OCaml”. This grant is intended to fund a number of improvements to OCaml, including the addition of new features and a possible re-design of the OCaml type-checker. This grant has allowed us to fund Jacques Garrigue's visit (10 months) and to hire Gabriel Radanne on a Starting Research Position (3 years).

• “Maintenance d'OCaml”. This grant is intended to fund the day-to-day maintenance of OCaml as well as the considerable work involved in managing the release cycle. This grant has allowed us to hire Florian Angeletti as an engineer for 3 years.

• “Multicore OCaml”. This grant is intended to encourage research work on Multicore OCaml within our team. This grant has allowed us to fund Glen Mével's PhD thesis (3 years).

Funding from the Microsoft-Inria joint lab

Funding from the Microsoft-Inria joint lab has allowed us to hire Ioannis Filippidis on a Starting Research Position (until March 2020) to work on the TLAPS system.