Is INRIA going to add concurrency primitives to OCaml?

Question

By "concurrency" I mean lightweight processes like Erlang's actors and concurrent GC aimed to make such a processes work smoothly.

It would be very cool if INRIA got rid of those drawbacks of the current OCaml implementation to make OCaml more prepared for the multicore future.

P.S. F# isn't what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

no

I cannot be more concise without reproducing his explanation. It speaks for itself. Yes, this is from 2002, but I haven't heard him sway on the issue, and from the text, it doesn't seem probable at all that he would back down from these goals.

For current developments on concurrent functional programming, possibly MPI solutions (with ocaml bindings) might be a solution to your problem. Obviously this is not shared memory parallelism. There is also concurrent ML.

Answer 2

There is J&oCaml, which is …

Objective Caml plus (&) the join calculus, that is, OCaml extended for concurrent and distributed programming.

Answer 3

It seems that Jane Street has funded a project for adding Concurrent GC to OCaml

• http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2008/04/ocaml-to-get-concurrent-garbage.html

• http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/msg/735752c0a7a0ba4c