newsfilter
← Interviews
Jane Street9 min

How to Use OCaml's Coercion Operator

camels

Lecture, Tutorial

This session explores standard OCaml's subtyping and coercion mechanisms, emphasizing how the `:>` operator enables compile-time type checks without runtime overhead or data reallocation. The discussion details value inclusion principles for polymorphic variants, recursive subtyping relations, and the specific constraints imposed by private type abbreviations to enforce invariants. While confirming that list coercions remain free at runtime, the presentation notes upcoming analysis of variant annotations and object types in future sessions.