mpl VS book

I'm one of the authors of this work -- I can explain a little.

"Provably efficient" means that the language provides worst-case performance guarantees.

For example in the "Automatic Parallelism Management" paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632880), we develop a compiler and run-time system that can execute extremely fine-grained parallel code without losing performance. (Concretely, imagine tiny tasks of around only 10-100 instructions each.)

The key idea is to make sure that any task which is *too tiny* is executed sequentially instead of in parallel. To make this happen, we use a scheduler that runs in the background during execution. It is the scheduler's job to decide on-the-fly which tasks should be sequentialized and which tasks should be "promoted" into actual threads that can run in parallel. Intuitively, each promotion incurs a cost, but also exposes parallelism.

In the paper, we present our scheduler and prove a worst-case performance bound. We specifically show that the total overhead of promotion will be at most a small constant factor (e.g., 1% overhead), and also that the theoretical amount of parallelism is unaffected, asymptotically.

All of this is implemented in MaPLe (https://github.com/mpllang/mpl) and you can go play with it now!

Maple is a fork of MLton: https://github.com/MPLLang/mpl

Some of us are still using SML for research and teaching, e.g. https://github.com/mpllang/mpl

Some of your questions might be answered in this book (free online version): https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

I don't think they're wrong

the Jane Street side are quite prolific with blog posts etc

as a newcomer to OCaml one of the first, and nicer-looking, intro resources you'll likely encounter is the Real World OCaml book https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ which unfortunately does everything using Base instead of the stdlib

Personally that didn't sit right to me and I prefer to use the stdlib by default (which seems fine and not in need of a wholesale replacement)

This is an oldie but a goodie.

OCaml has, unlike Standard ML, grown quite a lot since this page was made.

In particular, the section "Standard libraries", I'd recommend looking at:

https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

A couple of places where the comparison is outdated:

- OCaml using Base [1] allows for result-type oriented programming

- OCaml using Base uses less language magic and more module system

While there was and is truth to the distinction that SML is for scientists and OCaml is for engineers, this dichotomy is getting dated: OCaml is under active development, which means that scientists who want better tooling will choose OCaml. For example, 1ML [2] by Andreas Rossberg was built in OCaml.

[1]: https://opensource.janestreet.com/base/

Real World OCaml (version 2 is finally out) is also pretty good.

Real World OCaml is also a good resource, geared more towards people who already have some programming experience and want a more industry/practical focused learning experience.

ocaml.org’s new website is packed with lots of great early intros.

most learners eventually gravitate towards Real World OCaml https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ for additional learning.

Unfortunately, the learning resources for different domains out there isn’t as highly curated or prolific as, say, rust. If you do web dev like me, it takes a bit more work to find the tools and put them together. But the language itself lends itself well to systems level programming.

Fortunately, the forum is a great help.

In general, better read the second edition which is updated to use current Core versions. A print version was published recently.

I recommend https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ and https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/cover.html

Elm is not dead. It just prefers a slow release schedule but is still actively worked on in the background.

That said, you might want to check out OCaml for general purpose programming. Super fast compiler, great performance, can target both native and JS.

It is easier to use than Haskell due to defaulting to eager evaluation (like most languages) strategy instead of laziness and being generally more pragmatic, offering more escape hatches into the imperative world if need be. Plus great upward trajectory with lot's of cool stuff like an effects system and multi-core support coming.

Real World Ocaml is a decent resource: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/