From our perspective at Jane Street, unboxed types is a very high priority. A large slice of the team is thinking about it, and Chris Casinghino and Richard Eisenberg have joined recently and have it as their primary focus, along with Antal.
In terms of when it makes it upstream, that’s less clear. We’re working hard on getting out some initial versions done, and we plan on iterating internally, where it’s easier for us to try things out and then change them as we go. Once we have a design that we really believe in, we intend to propose it upstream, but how quickly that goes (and whether it’s successful at all!) depends on whether upstream maintainers and the larger community find the improvements compelling.
In any case, I find this conversation encouraging, since it suggests there’s some real hunger for improvements in this space.
I expect ICFP in particular to be a good opportunity for people to learn more about the work we’re doing both here, and also on type-safe stack allocation. (For what it’s worth, the latter is already in production internally and looks very promising.)
If you’ll be at ICFP:
- Richard Eisenberg will be giving a talk on unboxed types at the ML workshop
- Stephen Dolan will be giving a talk on stack allocation at the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop.
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