Jane Street wrote a compiler that converts Ocaml to Verilog which they run on FPGAs. The OCaml you write in that case is pretty different than what you write for CPUs.
Although I don’t work directly with the FPGA stuff, it’s still a very, very small piece of the overall pie (and new).
The motivation behind using Ocaml is mainly in its correctness(!) not because it’s fast (it’s not). See Knight Capital for a good example as to why. There are great videos on YT by Yaron Minsky that explain this better than I can.
Speaking of correctness and performance, was Ada/SPARK ever considered before you guys picked OCaml? Hypothetically, would you consider Ada/SPARK now, especially that SPARK has safe pointers and whatnot?
While Knight Capital's problem was caused by incompatible versions of the software talking to each other, one of the reasons that happened was the deployment of the code was not correct. The SEC notes:
> “During the deployment of the new code, however, one of Knight’s technicians did not copy the new code to one of the eight SMARS computer servers. Knight did not have a second technician review this deployment and no one at Knight realized that the Power Peg code had not been removed from the eighth server, nor the new RLP code added. Knight had no written procedures that required such a review.
Rumor on the outside suggests that Jane St uses OCaml for things like deploying software.
