[Caml-list] Flambda/compiler walkthrough + modularity

[Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>]

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Thank you so much to everyone involved with Flambda (OcamlPro, Jane Street,
and all the people who labored to make it happen). I'm so excited to have
such an awesome framework arrive in OCaml.

I have a question, and then a suggestion.

Is Flambda organized in such a modular way that we can add optimizations
over time? It seems to me that now that we have set the precedent for
having the AST in cmx files and have an interface for using that AST, the
sky is the limit in terms of optimizations.

The bigger issue I have is the following: I have long struggled with
grokking the codebase. A shortage of time has made it difficult, especially
because most of the codebase isn't as well documented as Flambda is. Some
parts, such as byte_run's C files, are quite simple, but other parts (in
particular the typechecker) are definitely trickier.

While thinking about the best way to learn the new Flambda code in the
minimal amount of time, I thought to myself, "wouldn't it be amazing to
have Pierre Chambart and Mark Shinwell just do a video walkthrough of their
code". And then I thought about the rest of the codebase, about Jacques
Garrigue doing a walkthrough of the typechecker code, and each expert(s)
talking about the parts they know really well, and about how amazing it
would be if we had this resource on youtube. It would be the ultimate form
of documentation by the foremost experts on aspects OCaml, welcoming
programmers to contribute to the OCaml compiler in the easiest way possible.

A step further would be if this was done on Twitch or some similar live
broadcasting platform, so people could actually ask live questions as the
session took place. The resulting video would be posted to youtube.

What do you guys think?

-Yotam

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