zlacker

>>noelwe+(OP)
it's a massive crime that decades into FP, we still don't have a type system that can infer or constrain the amount of copies and allocations a piece of code has. software would be massively better if it did - unnecessary copies and space leaks are some of the most performance-regressing bugs out there and there simply isn't a natural way of unearthing those.

>>boltzm+wy
We do now though, with OxCaml! The local stack allocation mode puts in quite a strong constraint on the shape of the allocations that are possible.

On my TODO list next is to hook up the various O(x)Caml memory profiling tools: we have statmemprof which does statistical sampling, and then the runtime events buffer, and (hopefully) stack activity in OxCaml's case from the compiler.

This provides a pretty good automation loop for a performance optimising coding agent: it can choose between heap vs local, or copy vs reference, or fixed layout (for SIMD) vs fragmentation (for multicore NUMA) depending on the tasks at hand.

Some references:

- Statmemprof in OCaml : https://tarides.com/blog/2025-03-06-feature-parity-series-st...

- "The saga of multicore OCaml" by Ron Minsky about how Jane Street viewed performance optimisation from the launch of OCaml 5.0 to where they are today with OxCaml https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGGSPpk1IB0