This fast-moving tutorial introduces you to OCaml, an industrial-strength programming language designed for expressiveness, safety, and speed. Through the book's many examples, you'll quickly learn how OCaml stands out as a tool for writing fast, succinct, and readable systems code using functional programming. Real World OCaml takes you through the concepts of the language at a brisk pace, and then helps you explore the tools and techniques that make OCaml an effective and practical tool. You'll also delve deep into the details of the compiler toolchain and OCaml's simple and efficient runtime system. This second edition brings the book up to date with almost a decade of improvements in the OCaml language and ecosystem, with new chapters covering testing, GADTs, and platform tooling. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core, thanks to the support of Tarides. Their generous contribution will bring more people to OCaml.

Table of Contents

Part I Language Concepts

A Guided Tour

Variables and Functions

Lists and Patterns

Files, Modules, and Programs

Records

Variants

Error Handling

Imperative Programming

GADTs

Functors

First-Class Modules

Objects

Part II Tools and Techniques

Maps and Hash Tables

Command-Line Parsing

Concurrent Programming with Async

Testing

Handling JSON Data

Parsing with OCamllex and Menhir

Data Serialization with S-Expressions

The OCaml Platform

Part Ill The Compiler and Runtime System

Foreign Function Interface

Memory Representation of Values

Understanding the Garbage Collector

The Compiler Frontend: Parsing and Type Checking

The Compiler Backend: Bytecode and Native code

About the Authors

Anil Madhavapeddy is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. He has used OCaml professionally for over two decades in numerous ventures, such as XenSource/Citrix and Unikernel Systems/Docker, and co-founded the MirageOS unikernel project. He is a member of the OCaml development team.

Yaron Minsky is Co-head of Technology at Jane Street, a major quantitative trading firm, where he introduced OCaml, and helped it become the firm's primary development platform. He is also the host of Jane Street's tech podcast, Signals & Threads, and has worked on everything from developer tools to trading strategies.