OCaml running on a 1960s UNIVAC 1219B

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Hi!

I’ve been meaning to post a recent-ish project of mine where I ran OCaml (and much more) on a 1960s UNIVAC 1219B! The demo I chose to run was a sudoku solver. In short, this was done by compiling OCaml to C, C to RISC-V, and then emulating RISC-V on the UNIVAC.

Full UNIVAC toolchain: Writeup, and source. Please see the my comment below for the other links! I’m unable to post more than two links in a post.

I also ran an OCaml program submitted by a friend that computed factors of numbers. At one point we thought the program crashed, but we were delighted when the program resumed ~5 minutes later. Turns out garbage collecting is slow on this machine :slight_smile:

Oh, and it works with OxCaml too!

Enjoy! Below are some pictures. (Disregard the earlier output, that was a run of ELIZA :slight_smile:)

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OCaml to C: Writeup, and source

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Sudoku solver source: OCaml, and compiled to C

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Very cool to see OCaml on retro hardware like this!

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Fantastic :heart_eyes: I need to try to adapt this for compilation for AVR microcontrollers (just for fun).

But why do you use Core? In my opinion, it’s overkill for everything except Jane Street itself.