Hello

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of December 22 to 29, 2009.

1. Sysadmin/programmer combo positions at Jane Street
2. multicore wish
3. concurrent cell supports FRP(beta)
4. Other Caml News

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/661d2b4ce1e85807#

The generic ad follows. And a specific note for caml-list consumers:
most of our systems automation software is written in OCaml.

-----

Sysadmin/Programmer combo
(aka Systems Automation Specialist)

Seeking:

Responsible, careful, passionate and skillful technology specialists to help
build and maintain our increasingly automated technology infrastructure.

You'll need to be adept with unix (specifically linux) administration. For
example, you want to be able to format filesystems, install bootloaders, and
make rpm packages. It's even better if you understand system calls, kernel
parameters, IO schedulers, and other lower level internals.

You'll also need to be a good programmer. We only want people who've had
experience writing significant amounts of real-world code. OCaml is our
language of choice, but it's okay if you don't know it so long as you can learn
it. Experience in ruby, python, php, perl, scheme, haskell, erlang, and others
are all acceptable.

About us:

Jane Street is a proprietary trading firm with offices in NYC, London and Tokyo
(this ad is for NYC positions). We have about 200 employees total, the majority
of whom work in NYC. While this makes us a medium-sized business, the culture
more closely resembles that of a small startup: The atmosphere is casual and
informal; we care about doing good work more than dress codes or hours put in;
there's not much room for office politics; and, there's a lot of financial
upside if you do great work.

We have a large datacenter on-site and several colocation facilities, with
hundreds of servers total. We manage all of this with just a small team by
leveraging our programming skills to create scalable, automated systems. We use
a lot of open source tools and write the rest ourselves.

Our systems team is tightly integrated with the rest of the company so you get
exposure to a broad range of concepts and ideas. Unlike at other large
financial firms, our technology group is highly regarded and central to our
business, not just a footnote.

Perks:

In addition to our excellent benefits which you can read about here:

 http://www.janestreet.com/workplace/benefits.php

we have on-site classes taught by employees on subjects ranging from
programming to finance to trading to bridge (yes, the game).


If this sounds like a match to your background, skills, and disposition, let us
know. Send a cover letter indicating why you think you're a good fit, along
with your resume, to ogunden@janestreet.com.
			

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/929a8af139dcdce0/508385d30a035daf

> There is one implementation: http://www.algo-prog.info/ocmc/web/
> But as said maybe not a verry good one.
>
> I tried implementing parallel threads under the original GC by forking
> multiple instances of the same program and using a Bigarray to mmap
> /dev/null for shared memory between the instances. That works for
> sharing primitive types, flat records (records of primitive types) and
> even fixed (or bound) sized structures but it gets more and more
> complex to share each and needs some Obj magic, marshaling or C stubs
> (except for primitive types). It works but is a real hack.

It works with all types:

https://godirepo.camlcity.org/svn/lib-ocamlnet2/trunk/code/src/netsys/netsys_mem.mli

look for init_value. It's non-released code yet.

However, there are some problems: Values outside the heap do not support
the polymorphic comparison and hash functions. That's a hard limitation,
e.g. you cannot even compare two strings, or build a hash table with
strings as keys. That limits the usefulness of shared memory.

Also, as we are striving for safe programs, there is the question when
shared memory can be safely released. The GC could help here, but there
are no ways to hook in, e.g. to get notified when there are no pointers
anymore to a value living in shared memory.
			

In OCaml 3.11 and later, you can call

  caml_page_table_add(In_static_area, start, end)

to inform the run-time system that the address range [start, end)
contains well-formed Caml data that polymorphic primitives can safely
work on.  This should solve your problem.
			

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/bebd0fc9ba8c34bd#

New beta release of concurrent cell supports thread safe FRP(Functional
Reactive Programming).

concurrent cell versoin 3.0 beta
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/frs/?group_id=42&release_id=227

There are two new modules Frp.TimeVaryReact and Frp.TimeVaryEvent consists of
a type and functions as follows:

 module rec TimeVaryReact : sig
  type 'a t
  val make : ?src:'a Mbox.t -> 'a -> 'a t * ('a -> unit)
  val return : 'a -> 'a t
  val read : 'a t -> 'a
  val map : ('a -> 'b) -> 'a t -> 'b t
  val map2 : ('a -> 'b -> 'c) -> 'a t -> 'b t -> 'c t
  val app : ('a -> 'b) t -> 'a t -> 'b t
  val join : 'a t t -> 'a t
  val switch : 'a t -> 'a t TimeVaryEvent.t -> 'a t
  val bind : 'a t -> ('a -> 'b t) -> 'b t
  val accum : 'a -> ('a -> 'a) TimeVaryEvent.t -> 'a t
  val fold : ('a -> 'b -> 'a) -> 'a -> 'b TimeVaryEvent.t -> 'a t
  val changes : ?eq:('a -> 'a -> bool) -> 'a t -> 'a TimeVaryEvent.t
  val history : int -> 'a t -> 'a list t
 end
 and TimeVaryEvent : sig
  type 'a t
  val make : ?src:'a Mbox.t -> unit -> 'a t * ('a -> unit)
  val map : ('a -> 'b) -> 'a t -> 'b t
  val listen : ('a -> unit) -> 'a t -> unit
  val map2 : ('a -> 'b -> 'c) -> 'a t -> 'b t -> 'c t
  val merge : 'a t -> 'a t -> 'a t
  val filter : ('a -> bool) -> 'a t -> 'a t
  val fmap : ('a -> 'b option) -> 'a t -> 'b t
  val join : 'a t t -> 'a t
  val accum : 'a -> ('a -> 'a) t -> 'a t
  val fold : ('a -> 'b -> 'a) -> 'a  -> 'b t -> 'a t
  val select : 'a t list -> 'a t
  val switch : 'a t -> 'a t t -> 'a t
  val history : int -> 'a t -> 'a list t
  val with_prev : 'a t -> ('a * 'a) t
  val changes : ?eq:('a -> 'a -> bool) -> 'a t -> 'a t
 end

This implementation based on this paper. (thanks to Conal Elliott) 
http://conal.net/papers/simply-reactive/

I intend to release version 3.0.0 after checking memory leaks, speed and bugs.
			

Thanks to Alp Mestan, we now include in the Caml Weekly News the links to the
recent posts from the ocamlcore planet blog at http://planet.ocamlcore.org/.

Constructive gem: irrational to the power of irrational that is rational:
  http://math.andrej.com/2009/12/28/constructive-gem-irrational-to-the-power-of-irrational-that-is-rational/

ocaml-mysql 1.1.0 released:
  http://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=501

Functional Macramé:
  http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2009/12/functional-macrame.html

Gained in Translation:
  http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2009/12/gained-in-translation.html

ocamlbob - an ocaml irc bot:
  https://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/ocamlbob/
      

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