Preface

This volume of EPTCS comprises selected papers based on work presented at the ML Family Workshop and the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop in Nara, Japan, September 2016. The editors are grateful to the authors of the papers, all of whom have revised and substantially extended their works beyond their original submissions. The editors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who spent a considerable amount of time reading, commenting upon and re-reading the papers presented here.

Readers will find in the volume a wide spectrum of works showing a snapshot of the modern functional programming language community in the ML tradition. It is notable how these works often span the bridge between theory and practice. A relational language of theoretical interest is shown to be embeddable in OCaml; likewise for the theory of algebraic effects, using the Eff language and a prototype version of Multicore OCaml as vehicles. The area of improving programmer productivity and reducing the risk of software failure through generic programming is addressed in the volume; as is the burgeoning area of scientific computing using functional languages. Finally are presented techniques by which the compilation of such languages can be tightly incorporated with the state-of-the art LLVM compiler technology that is gaining widespread adoption for imperative languages.

The editors hope that the volume makes for interesting and thought-provoking reading.