#049 - Is OCaml SaaS Ready?

Backend Banter

In today’s episode, we bring Leandro Ostera, a seasoned software engineer, who’s currently leading the OCaml build system team, with the mission of making OCaml SaaS ready! Join us as this episode is packed with a variety of topics, where we mainly focus on the OCaml ecosystem, compare it to other languages and frameworks, but also dabble into very obscure topics such as Idris (hint: it’s a programming language), and explore concepts such as routine blocking, scheduling, types, and other issues.

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Check out Riot: https://riot.ml/

Leandro's Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/leostera

Leandro's Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/leostera

Timestamps:

00:28 Leandro's Background
01:37 How Leandro got involved with OCaml
02:50 What the heck is Idris???
07:03 When Leandro started working with OCaml
11:34 ReasonML
15:48 The Riot Library and OCaml issues
18:00 Type Inference in OCaml
23:10 What allowed Riot to move so fast
24:17 The ecosystem of a language
28:14 Is Riot a Concurrency Library or a Web Framework?
31:01 Goroutines refresher
33:02 How Riot implements the actor-model
38:34 Cooperative Scheduling vs Preemptive Scheduling
41:30 How to fix routine blocking
43:14 What has Leandro and other contributers shipped?
46:25 How does Leandro manage his time to work on all of these projects?
49:45 Where to find Leandro