enso VS ocaml-multicore

I'm working on the Enso programming language (https://github.com/enso-org/enso), so I will be trying to solve the challenges in the Enso Analytics tool, as our team has been doing for the last two years.

It's always fun to see how we progressed since the previous challenge, making it more pleasant to work with (and also see where the rough corners still are).

Enso

> At least I have yet to see one that is actually useful in the sense of a generic (or even a single-purpose-built) language

Yeah as said, https://github.com/enso-org/enso seems to be a general purpose functional programming language with visual editor, but otherwise I haven't really seen any no-code solutions worth their salt. I'm not particularly a fan of enso either, but it's the best I've seen.

Although it's not quite the same, I do like what Enso[0] is bringing to the table, especially the 1:1 visual node/language interop. Whether this is generalisable to a fully decoupled interface remains to be seen, but there's definitely potential.

[0]: https://enso.org/

I think Enso is already taken by a YC company [0]. Could get confusing.

[0] https://enso.org

COMPANY: Enso Inc. TYPE: Full time LOCATION: Europe and United States of America – fully distributed company REMOTE: Only remote VISA: No VISA required DESCRIPTION: Hi, we are Enso (enso.org, Y Combinator S21)! We are looking for an amazing Cloud engineer to join our core team. We are a remote first company, working in Europe and the USA.

Friends of mine are developing Enso (https://enso.org/), an interactive programming language with dual visual and textual representations.

Even well before Bret Victor's time, there were tools for visual programming. I have been using LabView to maintain data processing in an optical laboratory.

1. Domains are the unit of parallelism. A domain is essentially an OS thread with a bunch of extra runtime book-keeping data. You can use Domain.spawn (https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore/blob/5.00...) to spawn off a new domain which will run the supplied function and terminate when it finishes. This is heavyweight though, domains are expected to be long-running.

2. Domainslib is the library developed alongside multicore to aid users in exploiting parallelism. It supports nested parallelism and is pretty highly optimised (https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/domainslib/pull/29 for some graphs/numbers). The domainslib repo has some good examples: https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/domainslib/tree/master/te...

3. We've not tested against other forms of parallelism. There isn't anything stopping you exploiting SIMD in addition to parallelism from domains.

4. No, we've not compared performance by OS.

5. No plans for the multicore team to look at accelerator integration at the moment.

For Algebraic Effects and Multicore OCaml specifically, I have this intro saved and they've been publishing regular updates here's October's. They have a paper linked from their repo's README but I don't remember the contents offhand.

Until recently Multicore OCaml was focused on deep handlers. The people working on the formalization of effects (either for program proofs or typed effects) were quite keen to have shallow handler integrated however. Thus, the effect module of the OCaml 5 preview contains both (see https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore/blob/5.00...) since September. I fear that non-academic literature has not followed this change (on the academic side, see https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3434314 for a program proofs point of view).

Yes, it's announcing that the next but one version, 5.0, will support multicore and effect handlers.

For what it's worth you can actually start using Multicore OCaml today, there are installation instructions on the wiki: https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore

ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore

Could you explain (in simple terms if possible) how the Multicore OCaml achieves a memory model which is much simpler on more efficient than in Java or C (mentioned at https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore/wiki)?

Didn't see any mentions of critical sections (mutexes) with C++ examples in the documentation ("Bounding Data Races in Space and Time"). I'm not sure I understand the comparisons the writers are presenting.

There are getting started instructions up on https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore