Blog Articles

What's new in Ocamlnet 3: Synchronization primitives in Netplex

Ocamlnet is being renovated, and there is already a first testing version of Ocamlnet 3. The author, Gerd Stolpmann, explains in a series of articles what is new, and why Ocamlnet is the best networking platform ever seen. When it comes to parallelism, many people react skeptical on multi-processing - ... (read more)

First testing version

A first testing version of Ocamlnet 3 has been released: Ocamlnet-3.0test1. (read more)

What's new in Ocamlnet 3: Highly-available RPC

Ocamlnet is being renovated, and there will be soon a first testing version of Ocamlnet 3. The author, Gerd Stolpmann, explains in a series of articles what is new, and why Ocamlnet is the best networking platform ever seen. Experience with Hydro, another RPC implementation for Ocaml using the ICE ... (read more)

What's new in Ocamlnet 3: The Win32 port

Ocamlnet is being renovated, and there will be soon a first testing version of Ocamlnet 3. The author, Gerd Stolpmann, explains in a series of articles what is new, and why Ocamlnet is the best networking platform ever seen. One of the fundamental and intriguing improvements is the port to ... (read more)

PXP-1.2.1 with a new reference manual

The last release of a stable PXP version happened 5 years ago. That's a long time. Actually, a lot of devlopment took place since then, only that it was difficult to bring PXP into a releasable shape. Now the last missing piece has been added, namely extensive documentation. So I ... (read more)

A scalable implementation of matrix multiplications in O'Caml

O'Caml seems not be recognized as a programming language where it is easy to parallelize tasks. Recently, there was a heated discussion on caml-list about this subject, and people complained that the memory management of O'Caml does not work well for multi-threaded programs. Actually, the memory manager enforces that only ... (read more)

The ranking algorithm behind GODI Search

The question has always been: Are the results better if a search engine really understands the text it indexes? You can view my latest project, GODI Search, as an attempt to answer this question for a very limited set of documents, namely the code and its documentation of GODI, the ... (read more)

The Story Behind Hydro

On the surface a search engine looks like a very simple web site, but actually most things happen in the backend, and are hidden from the user. A search engine consists of 10 to 20 different types of servers, and many of them are instantiated several times in a cluster ... (read more)

Using Polymorphic Variants

It is one of the coolest language constructs, but its conception leads sometimes to confusion. O'Caml allows it to form ad-hoc unions of tagged values, the so-called polymorphic variants. They are the free-style counterpart of the "normal" variant types. We want to shed some light on this construction in this ... (read more)