Conference Presentation
Jane and the Compiler
- Jane Street plans to permanently replace its internal "Jenga" build system with the open-source "Dune" within the next few months, aiming to eventually serve as the organization's sole build infrastructure and eliminate separate internal and external rules.
- The firm intends to integrate a significantly more sophisticated version of the "F Lambda" intermediate representation into the OCaml compiler by the end of next year, building on current 10% to 20% performance gains to achieve 100x performance improvements and expand zero-allocation program capabilities.
- Jane Street expects to resolve technical inefficiencies where combining "F Lambda" and "Space Time" causes slow cross-compilation and hopes to eventually stabilize the F Lambda inliner to eliminate unpredictability regarding allocation elimination.
- The organization plans to fix the incredibly slow compilation process caused by cross-compilation inefficiencies and continues to hire a dedicated organization established around 2015 to extend the OCaml compiler with improved debuggability, including full integration with GDB or LLDB.
- Jane Street anticipates a multi-year timeline for the "modular implicit" feature without a clear final release date, viewing it as a significant engineering effort intended to provide a cleaner approach to implicit type decisions than Haskell's type classes.
- The firm expects "typed algebraic effects" to enable a backwards-compatible separation of pure and imperative code, though uncertainty remains regarding whether the feature's benefits outweigh the added complexity.
- Jane Street plans to extend the "Space Time" memory debugger to offer a richer family of memory profiling choices, including statistical sampling options designed to reduce the high RAM costs associated with full heap analysis.
- The organization intends to grow the OCaml ecosystem and invest in language engineering over the next 20 years to maintain compiler excellence, ensure the language remains attractive for hiring, and prevent OCaml from becoming an avoided legacy language like "COBOL."
- Jane Street expects "Generalized Algebraic Data Types" (GADTs) to continue providing value in systems programming for precise memory layout and high-performance message-oriented systems, alongside anticipated engineering efforts to fix GADT support bugs.
- The firm plans to continue leveraging "first class modules" for elegant abstractions in modular systems and to simplify component composition previously reliant on manual wiring and complex runtime logic.
- Jane Street expects tools like "Merlin" to become increasingly valuable for discoverability and interaction as the team grows, particularly supporting traders who operate the system part-time.
- The organization anticipates that the JavaScript backend for OCaml will effectively preserve the OCaml memory model, allowing complex libraries to function in JavaScript environments.
- Jane Street aims to fix the technical issue where the combination of "F Lambda" and "Space Time" causes slow compilation due to cross-compilation inefficiencies, while also expecting "typed algebraic effects" to potentially retro-fit OCaml for separating pure code from imperative code in a backwards-compatible manner.