What is the state of OCaml’s parallelization abilities?

This 2009 issue of the Caml weekly news (“CWN”, a digest of interesting messages from the caml list) shows that:

  • the official party line on threads and Ocaml hasn’t changed. A notable quote:

    (…) in general, the whole standard library is not thread-safe. Probably that should be stated in the
    documentation for the threads library, but there isn’t much point in documenting it per standard library module. — X. Leroy

    (for how Ocaml threads can still be useful, see a remark by the culprit himself in another question on SO)

  • the most frequently adopted paradigm for parallelism is message-passing, and of note is X. Leroy’s OcamlMPI, providing bindings for programming in SPMD style against the MPI standard. The same CWN issue I pointed to above provides references to examples, and numerous other related projects.

  • another message-passing solution is JoCaml, pioneering new style of concurrent communications known as join calculus. Note that it is binary-compatible with OCaml compilers.

  • that did not prevent the confection of a runtime whose GC is ok with parallelism, though: see a discussion of OCAML4MC in this other issue of the CWN.

There is also:

  • Netmulticore – multi-processing sharing ocaml values via mapped shared memory.

  • CamlP3l – compiler for Caml parallel programs.

  • OCaml-Java – an OCaml compiler that emits Java bytecode


I haven’t followed more recent discussions about Ocaml & parallel programming, though. I’m leaving this CW so that others can update what I mention. It would be great if this question could reach the same level of completeness as the analogous one for Haskell.

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