OCaml Workshop 2026

Introduction

OCaml workshop: https://ocaml.org/ocaml-workshop-2026/schedule. This year's OCaml workshop was co-located with Functional Programming Workshops 2026 in Paris. Several members from Tarides participated

Sudha

Standing in a lecture hall at INRIA, wrestling with an AV setup minutes before the first talk, I had a moment to wonder how I’d ended up here. It started with an email from last year’s chair.

I was asked by the previous year’s chair to take on the responsibility this year. What I also didn’t know was that the OCaml Workshop this time was not a co-located event at ICFP.

Now, I’ve been to several OCaml Workshops at ICFP, but an OCaml Workshop outside of ICFP was new. Taking it as a new experience, I was on board, and the lookout for a co-chair was on. Given this was my first time chairing, I also preferred having a co-chair. Two people overseeing things is smoother than one person doing it. Paulo de Vilhena offered to take up the task, and we got started. Paulo and I still haven’t met in person. Chairing a workshop together entirely over email turns out to be perfectly doable.

We started with assembling a PC. We did not have the luxury of time and needed to assemble a team quickly. Thanks to all the PC members who accepted the invitation to be on the committee, we managed to do the task in time.

The thing about being a self-organised conference is that you don’t have the machinery that comes with a professionally managed conference. But we did manage to find our own ways to make it work. When it came to a CFP system, Gabriel Scherer helped us set up a home-grown HotCRP instance managed by INRIA.

We sent out the CFP and started receiving submissions. So far, so good. We had fewer submissions than usual, but still a sizeable number. There could be many reasons for it — being at the same time as ICFP, and falling during summer when many folks are off, to name a few. Nevertheless, we had enough submissions that we had to reject a few. The PC team did an excellent job in curating a nice set of talks.

On the day itself, I reached the conference venue (INRIA) early. Gabriel and Raphael Proust were already present. Gabriel, Raphael, Yannick Forster and team did most of the local organisation work, and we’re appreciative of it.

The conference day went mostly as planned. We did have to figure out the AV setup, and that was quite an experience. It was good to meet and catch up with colleagues and old friends. I was too occupied to make any new connections this time, but there’s always a next time. Overall, I’m happy with how things went, and it’s also good to know that presenters and attendees found it valuable.

Paul-Elliot

It was my first time going to the Ocaml Workshop! Glad I did not need long train travel to get there, but sad I did not see a new place.

I had two presentations accepted: One about a personal project, Slipshow, and the other about a work did mostly by Ulysse, with some small contribution by me. That took quite a lot of time to prepare! But I love preparing and making presentations, so it was fine.

It was really cool to see all these familiar faces, and discuss with them again. The OCaml community is a really nice one, and I can now put faces on most of the handles!

Edwin Török

I didn't have a paper to present this time, but I was still keen on seeing what the OCaml community was up to this year. This is the only conference that I always try to attend (at least virtually). So I was quite happy to see that the workshop was close by. It was actually my 2nd visit to Paris this year, after the Tarides off-site.

Since before joining Tarides I've been invited to join the OCaml security team (an OCSF initiative, announced at a previous Fun-OCaml conference). This workshop seemed like a good opportunity to remind people about its existence, and invite feedback. After some discussion with the workshop organizers we got a small slot that I presented, which was also an opportunity to meet some of the other security team members in person.

It is nice to see a growing trend of performance-focused presentations: "JSON parsing in OxCaml: fast, but not too fast" reminded me of the odiff presentation from FunOCaml. And of course I was already aware of "Towards a Benchmarking Service for OCaml", as I work in the same team.

I have a long list of things to try now from new unikernel workflows to Merlin improvements and browser based static analyzers! More about these as soon as I find time to try them.

The next day was the ICFP "watch party". Due to timezone differences this wasn't the entire session (and I had to get the train back the day after), but it was more useful than watching it on my own. There was an interesting idea that a Q&A-like session would be done locally in the room (instead of just watching the remote Q&A.)

Ulysse Gérard

I already attended a few OCaml workshop before this one and it is always a joy to interact with other members of the community. I co-presented a talk about a new Short-paths implementation with Paul-Elliot which I hoped will make users think about the complex machineries that the compiler and Merlin rely even when performing seemingly trivial tasks such as printing types !