Section: Application Domains

High-assurance software

Software that is not critical enough to undergo formal verification can still benefit greatly, in terms of reliability and security, from a functional, statically-typed programming language. The OCaml type system offers several advanced tools (generalized algebraic data types, abstract types, extensible variant and object types) to express many data structure invariants and safety properties and have them automatically enforced by the type-checker. This makes OCaml a popular language to develop high-assurance software, in particular in the financial industry. OCaml is the implementation language for the Tezos blockchain and cryptocurrency. It is also used for automated trading at Jane Street and for modeling and pricing of financial contracts at Bloomberg, Lexifi and Simcorp. OCaml is also widely used to implement code verification and generation tools at Facebook, Microsoft, CEA, Esterel Technologies, and many academic research groups, at Inria and elsewhere.