OCaml All The Way Down

Andy Ray

Jane Street

Did you know that Jane Street uses OCaml for, like, everything?

Did you also know that Jane Street builds FPGA designs?

A problem?

Come and find out how we design and test our FPGAs. We’ll have some fun (or terrible disasters) with some demos on the Arty A7 hobbyist FPGA board, with the design expressed using HardCaml, an OCaml library for creating hardware designs, and driven by an embedded software stack written in OCaml and using ports of your favorite Jane Street libraries.

I’ll round up with some thoughts on the pros and cons of writing hardware in OCaml, and talk about some ideas we would like to explore to make the process more productive in the future.