OCaml 2024

OCaml is currently receiving a strong upward trend, particularly since its new runtime environment was released in 2022, which introduced support for shared memory parallelism and effect handlers. That trend can be observed both on social media and in academia, where the OCaml Compiler Distribution received the 2023 Programming Languages Software Award by ACM SIGPLAN.

The OCaml Users and Developers Workshop brings together industrial users of OCaml with academics and hackers who are working on extending the language, type system, and tools. Previous editions have been co-located with ICFP 2012 in Copenhagen, ICFP 2013 in Boston, ICFP 2014 in Gothenburg, ICFP 2015 in Vancouver, ICFP 2016 in Nara, ICFP 2017 in Oxford, ICFP 2018 in St Louis, ICFP 2019 in Berlin, ICFP 2020 virtually, ICFP 2021 virtually, ICFP 2022 in Ljubljana, and ICFP 2023 in Seattle.

OCaml 2024 will be held on September 7th 2024 in Milan, Italy. We aim to organize it as a hybrid event with the same streaming modalities as for OCaml 2023, allowing people to attend and even give talks remotely.

Call for Papers

The call for talk proposals is open. We encourage everyone who is considering submitting a proposal to do so. We’re looking forward to the submissions and talks!

Scope

Presentations and discussions focus on the OCaml programming language as well as the OCaml ecosystem and its community. We aim to solicit talks on all aspects and perspectives related to improving the use or development of the language and its programming environment. Different aspects include, for example (but are not limited to):

• compiler developments, new backends, runtime and architectures
• practical type system improvements, such as GADTs, first-class modules, generic programming, or dependent types
• new library, tool or application releases, and their design rationales
• tools and infrastructure services, and their enhancements
• prominent industrial or experimental uses of OCaml, or deployments in unusual situations.

Different perspectives include, for example (but are not limited to):

• scientific and/or research-oriented
• engineering and/or user-oriented
• social and/or community-oriented.

Presentations

The workshop is an informal meeting with no formal proceedings. The presentation material will be available online from the workshop homepage. The presentations may be recorded and made available at a later date.

The main presentation format is a workshop talk, traditionally around 20 minutes in length, plus question time, but we might also have a poster session during the workshop – this allows to present more diverse work, and gives time for discussion. The program committee will decide which presentations should be delivered as posters or talks.

Submission

To submit a presentation, please register a description of the talk (about 2 pages long) at https://ocaml2024.hotcrp.com/ providing a clear statement of what will be provided by the presentation: the problems that are addressed, the solutions or methods that are proposed.

You can find all accepted proposals from last year on last year’s event overview.

Length and format

We recommend trying to fit the proposal into two pages for two reasons: to respect the reviewers’ time and to adjust to the time you’ll have when giving the talk. However, it’s not a problem if it’s a bit longer.

LaTeX-produced PDFs are a common and welcome submission format. For accessibility purposes, we ask PDF submitters to also provide the sources of their submission in a textual format, such as .tex sources. Reviewers may read either the submitted PDF or the text version.

Evaluation criteria

We will evaluate submissions according to the following aspects:

• relevance for the general OCaml community
• rigor and soundness
• novelty: new concepts/ideas, coverage of something unusual
• clear and understandable exposition of the content
• potential to deliver an engaging and informative (from a theoretical or practical point of view) presentation.

Not all submissions are expected to meet all criteria.

Quota of accepted talks per affiliation

In order to guarantee coverage of diverse topics and perspectives, we will follow the initiative from last year’s workshop and experiment with a quota of maximum four accepted talks by speakers with the same affiliation. Do not hesitate to submit your talk proposal in any case: quotas will be taken in account by the PC when deciding which submissions to accept. We know that authors may have many affiliations, or affiliations that are very broad (e.g. national research institutes). Judging from previous years we do not expect this to be a problem in most cases: the quota is intended to rule out extreme cases (e.g. having a disproportionate amount of accepted talks from colleagues of the same company).

Hybrid attendance and cost for speakers

We’re aiming to make the workshop hybrid, meaning that talks as well as participation can be either in-person or remote, and remote attendance will be free. To promote a good atmosphere, communication and engagement, we’ll prefer to have most talks in-person, but remote talks will be most welcome as well.

We know that giving the talk in-person comes with an economic cost. We’re very happy to announce that thanks to the OCaml Software Foundation, registration fees will be covered for speakers in cases they can’t get it funded by other means (e.g. their employer).

We will do our best to provide the best workshop experience possible for remote participants, within the constraints of the hybrid format. Attending in-person does come with an environmental cost, and we strongly support transitioning to a less plane-intensive organization for conferences and community events.

ML family workshop

The ML family workshop, held on the previous day, deals with general issues of the ML-style programming and type systems, focuses on more research-oriented work that is less specific to a language in particular. There is an overlap between the two workshops, and we have occasionally transferred presentations from one to the other in the past. Authors who feel their submission fits both workshops are encouraged to mention it at submission time and/or contact the Program Chairs.