Towards a native toplevel for the OCaml language

TL;DR

This paper introduces a native toplevel for OCaml that leverages JIT compilation to significantly improve performance, achieving up to 100 times faster execution than the default bytecode toplevel.

Contribution

It presents a novel native toplevel for OCaml that uses JIT compilation, providing substantial speed improvements over existing solutions.

Findings

Native toplevel is up to 100 times faster than bytecode toplevel.

It uses JIT techniques to compile OCaml phrases to native code at runtime.

Works on Unix-like systems with x86/x86-64 processors.

Abstract

This paper presents the current state of our work on an interactive toplevel for the OCaml language based on the optimizing native code compiler and runtime. Our native toplevel is up to 100 times faster than the default OCaml toplevel, which is based on the byte code compiler and interpreter. It uses Just-In-Time techniques to compile toplevel phrases to native code at runtime, and currently works with various Unix-like systems running on x86 or x86-64 processors.