Principles of Programming (PoP) Seminar - Yaron Minsky

— 3:00pm

Location:
In Person - Gates Hillman 8102

Speaker:
YARON MINSKY , Head of Technology, Jane Street
https://github.com/yminsky

The saga of runtime 5

In December 2022, after nearly a decade of development, OCaml 5.0.0 was released with OCaml’s first multi-core capable runtime. This was an exciting milestone, finally making it possible to write shared-memory parallel programs in OCaml. The new runtime was designed to be easy to adopt: it didn’t disturb OCaml’s FFI, and performance was meant to be only a couple of percentage points slower in single-core mode. Despite those promising beginnings, switching to runtime-5 was harder than we expected. Indeed, We’ve only managed to switch to it this year, after months and months of research and engineering effort to make it work for our use-cases. 

This talk will give an overview of the problems we ran into, and why switching to runtime-5 was so much harder than we expected. We’ll also discuss what we learned from the process, both about how to stage a complex change like this, as well as some new things we learned about how to design a GC, and the improvements we landed in OCaml as part of that work. 

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Yaron Minsky received his BA in Mathematics from Princeton and his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell focusing on distributed systems. He joined Jane Street in 2003, where he founded the firm's quantitative research group. He introduced OCaml, a statically typed functional programming language, to the company and managed the transition to using OCaml for all of its core infrastructure, turning Jane Street into the world's largest industrial user of the language.  He's been involved in many different aspects of Jane Street's technology stack, including machine learning infrastructure, distributed systems design, incremental programming systems, hardware synthesis,  trading and risk systems, developer tools, and user-interface toolkits. 

Faculty Host:  Seth Goldstein

Event Website:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pop/seminar/

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