This project, originally conceived by Anil Madhavapeddy, hopes to make it easier to answer questions like "What is the safest route to Pembroke College from Cambridge train station?". Here, "safest", can have lots of meanings: the best lit road, a route with tactile paving or accessible pedestrian signals etc.

In addition to this, we may wish to provide suggestions for how to improve the current folksonomy of information OSM stores.

Following the work of Adaptive Functional Programming and Implicit self-adjusting computation, this project will build an incremental computation engine in OCaml alongside an expressive combinator library for build such computations. As an extension, a small DSL will be built that makes use of the engine to build an implicitly incremental programming language.

The core of this project is to implement an eDSL and a runtime in OCaml for self-adjusting computation. I also propose a new TDT which allows for generic monoidal folds over modifiable sequences: the library will include a native foldMap primitive that allows performant reduction over a modifiable sequence of modifiable values for any general monoid, giving logarithmic updates with a small trace. I will then compare foldMap to the generic fold implemented in plain SAC.

-- From Boris' Proposal

This project wants to reuse OCaml's typechecker to provide a safe way to create graphics shaders. As an extension, a ppx rewriter will provide a translation layer from OCaml to the embedded DSL making it possible to write shaders in a subset of the OCaml language.

When interacting with the GPU for graphics programming, parts of the rendering pipeline are written as standalone shader programs. The standard method of using these is to store the shader source code as a string, which is then compiled at runtime by the GPU driver. This is not a performance issue, as shader programs are usually small enough that compilation time is negligible. However, it does mean simple syntax errors or incorrect types, which would normally be caught at compilation, won’t manifest until the entire program is run.

I propose a new library, Shaders_of_ocaml, allowing for shader programs to be written inline as native OCaml, which is then compiled to shader code strings to be passed to the existing graphics libraries. This would allow the OCaml compiler to provide type checking for every shader written.

-- From Rohan's Proposal