An oft overlooked aspect of programming language development process is benchmarking. While popular CI/CD tools such as Azure pipelines, Gitlab CI, Circle CI, Drone.io and Github Actions are regularly used for continuous testing and deployment, there is a dearth of such tools for continuous benchmarking. This is because benchmarking well is challenging due to the care needed to choose appropriate benchmarks, the complexity of modern OSes and hardware that makes it hard to obtain reproducible results, and a powerful dashboard needed to surface resultant metrics in a useful manner that can be explored interactively by the developer.

For benchmarking the compiler of the OCaml [1] programming language, we have developed Sandmark [2]. Sandmark is a (a) suite of well chosen benchmarks aimed at exercising different performance axes including CPU, memory and IO (b) a tool to run the benchmarks, building the compiler and its dependencies under varying configuration settings and (c) a dashboard [3] to interactively explore the results of the benchmark runs. Sandmark was originally developed for supporting the Multicore OCaml [4] project, which aims to add native support for concurrency and parallelism to OCaml, and has undergone significant improvements since the initial release [5]. 

We have learnt several useful lessons in building a continuous benchmarking infrastructure that we would like to share in this talk, which may benefit developers who work on projects where performance is critical. In this talk, I will describe the Sandmark tool, illustrate the quirks of modern OSes and hardware and how we overcame them, highlighting useful takeaways for setting up continuous benchmarking for your own projects.

References:

[1] OCaml: https://ocaml.org/
[2] Sandmark: https://github.com/ocaml-bench/sandmark
[3] sandmark-nightly: https://github.com/ocaml-bench/sandmark-nightly
[4] Multicore OCaml: https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore/
[5] Tom Kelly. Benchmarking the OCaml compiler: our experience, OCaml Workshop 2019, https://icfp19.sigplan.org/details/ocaml-2019-papers/3/Benchmarking-the-OCaml-compiler-our-experience

GNU Emacs is a popular text editor for functional programming (Clojure, Haskell, Idris et. al.). This talk provides a demonstration of using GNU Emacs as part of your daily workflow. The different topics that will be addressed include project and time management, development, IRC, DevOps, managing secret files, e-mail, listening to music, reading news feeds, blogging, book publishing, etc. Emacs Lisp code snippets will be shared to demonstrate the setup and customization. The ~/.emacs.d configuration is available at:

https://github.com/shakthimaan/cask-dot-emacs

This talk is an introduction on lambda calculus and will address the foundations of functional programming languages.

We will learn the building blocks of lambda calculus - syntax, rules, and application.