Some papers related to Objective Caml

Textbooks and tutorials

• Développement d'applications avec Objective Caml, Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury, Bruno Pagano, O'Reilly, Paris, april 2000.
  A comprehensive (742 pages) book on Objective Caml, covering not only the core language, but also modules, objects and classes, threads and systems programming, and interoperability with C.
  The text of this book (in French) is available on-line.

• Jason Hickey's introduction to Objective Caml as used in his compiler design course at Caltech.

• The Objective Caml manual begins with short tutorials on the core language, objects and classes, and modules.

• Didier Rémy's APPSEM course notes on Objective Caml (graduate level).

General overview

• Xavier Leroy, Le système Caml Special Light: modules et compilation efficace en Caml. Research report 2721, INRIA, november 1995.
  An overview of the Caml Special Light system (the ancestor of Objective Caml), covering the module system and the compiler, but not the object stuff. In French.

The object system

• Didier Rémy and Jérôme Vouillon, Objective ML: An effective object-oriented extension to ML. In Theory And Practice of Objects Systems, 4(1):27--50, 1998.
  Theoretical foundations for O'Caml objects.

• Didier Rémy, Programming Objects with ML-ART: An extension to ML with Abstract and Record Types. Proceedings of TACS'94.
  A simulation of objects and classes with extensible records and ML polymorphism; another insight on O'Caml objects

Theoretical foundations of the module system

• Xavier Leroy, Manifest types, modules, and separate compilation. POPL 94.
  The bases of the module system.

• Xavier Leroy, Applicative functors and fully transparent higher-order modules. POPL 95.
  Extension of the above to higher-order functors.

• Xavier Leroy, A syntactic theory of type generativity and sharing. Journal of Functional Programming, 6(5), 1996.
  A formal equivalence result between first-order O'Caml modules and SML modules without structure sharing.

The bytecode compiler and bytecode interpreter

• Xavier Leroy, The ZINC experiment, an economical implementation of the ML language. Technical report 117, INRIA, 1990.
  A description of the ZINC compiler, which later evolved into Caml Light, then into Objective Caml. Large parts of this report are out of date, but it is still valuable as a description of the abstract machine used in Caml Light and (with some further simplifications and speed improvements) in Objective Caml.

The native-code compiler

• Xavier Leroy, The effectiveness of type-based unboxing. Workshop Types in Compilation '97, Amsterdam.
  An overview and experimental comparison of several data representation strategies, including the one used in the Objective Caml native-code compiler.

The garbage collector

• Peter Sestoft -- The garbage collector used in Caml Light -- e-mail message, October 1994. -- 7k text file

• Damien Doligez and Xavier Leroy -- A concurrent, generational garbage collector for a multithreaded implementation of ML -- In Principles of Programming Languages -- ACM Press, January 1993. -- 59k gzipped PostScript file

• Damien Doligez and Georges Gonthier -- Portable, Unobtrusive Garbage Collection for Multiprocessor Systems -- In Principles of Programming Languages -- ACM Press, January 1994. -- 85k gzipped PostScript file

• Damien Doligez -- Conception, réalisation et certification d'un glaneur de cellules concurrent -- PhD thesis (in French), Université Paris 7, May 1995. -- 427k gzipped PostScript file

Implementation of the module system

• Xavier Leroy, A modular module system, Journal of Functional Programming, 10(3):269-303, 2000.
  A description of a simplified implementation of the O'Caml module system, emphasizing its independence w.r.t. the base language (Caml).

• François Pottier, Implémentation d'un système de modules évolué en Caml-Light. Research report 2449, INRIA, 1995.
  An earlier prototype implementation of modules in Caml Light, based on stamps instead of path equivalence. In French.