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OCaml Labs joins Tarides

27 January 2022

We are delighted to announce that OCaml Labs is joining Tarides. After
successfully collaborating on many OCaml projects over the last four years, this
alliance will combine the expertise of both groups and enable us to bring OCaml
- one of the most advanced programming languages in the world - into mainstream
use. Combining forces will accelerate OCaml development and its broader
adoption. Furthermore, it will bring the security, portability and performance
of OCaml to a large spectrum of use-cases: from academic endeavours such as
formal methods and existing threats within cyber security, to real-world
applications for climate change, sustainable agriculture, and even space
exploration.

OCaml Labs’ existing responsibilities and open source commitments will migrate
over to Tarides, and thanks to how closely the teams already work, business will
continue without interruption to continuity or delivery. Gemma Gordon will step
up as CEO of Tarides, and Thomas Gazagnaire will lead the technological vision
and strategy as CTO. As Prof. Anil Madhavapeddy - founder of OCaml Labs and
scientific advisor of Tarides - points out, “The cutting edge research we
conducted at the University over the past decade has now migrated into mainline
OCaml, and so the ongoing curation and development will now happen on a
commercially supported basis. I’m excited to continue collaborating on research
with Tarides from the University of Cambridge.” Tarides will continue the work
started at OCaml Labs and invest in the growth, health, and development of OCaml
alongside its wider use cases.

“I am honoured to have the incredible OCaml Labs team - the team who carefully
designed and crafted Multicore OCaml - join Tarides”, says Dr. Thomas
Gazagnaire, CTO of Tarides. “We share a similar view that a common plague
affects the ever-growing software industry: namely the bad quality of software
and the omnipresence of bugs. However, this is not a fatal flaw: tools developed
by OCaml Labs over the years do not compromise on quality and allow dev teams to
automatically fix at least 70% of security bugs and 0-days security exploits.
Consequently, OCaml is a simple yet powerful language that can respond to the
many challenges developers face today. Since Tarides’ inception we have
envisioned a future where all OCaml applications are easily deployable as
specialised, secure and energy-efficient MirageOS unikernels. This alliance is a
step further in that direction.” Since OCaml is the language used to develop
MirageOS, Tarides has continuously developed and maintained parts of the OCaml
ecosystem since its creation. Our alliance with OCaml Labs makes this more
evident: the MirageOS ecosystem critically depends on OCaml and the OCaml
ecosystem benefits from innovations coming from the MirageOS project. Tarides is
therefore fully committed to making the synergy between OCaml and MirageOS a
success.

Several exciting projects are coming to a head this year. As Gazagnaire says,
"2022 is the year of Multicore OCaml". The OCaml 5.0 release will support
multicore and effects handlers, influencing every aspect of the language and its
ecosystem. The update will significantly improve both performance and user
experience whilst maintaining existing features that make OCaml the language of
choice for building, for instance, verification software tools. Using the teams’
combined experience and zest for innovation, Tarides is looking to the future of
the OCaml language and community with excitement. We will continue to push the
boundaries of exploration whilst focusing on what's good for the community.
Therefore, this alliance will complement the commercial offering of Tarides and
contribute to Tarides' mission: empowering developers, communities and
organisations to adopt OCaml as their primary programming experience by
providing training, expertise and development services around the OCaml
language.

“We are thrilled to be part of an organisation innovating in many areas around
operating systems, distributed systems, and security with the Irmin distributed
store and the MirageOS unikernel projects”, says Gemma Gordon, CEO of Tarides.
“I am incredibly proud of the people OCaml Labs has collaborated with. We have
been able to build a sustainable open-source community, with people from various
backgrounds all collaborating together. It used to be that people would have to
volunteer their time on OCaml, or work in academic research. We have created an
additional funded path, one that has increased the diversity and innovation of
our community. I’m excited to continue to be part of a group that brings the
best minds together to solve the many problems the software industry faces
today. I look forward to building a flourishing and sustainable commercial
business with existing Tarides partners as well as developing new collaborative
opportunities.”

This alliance brings the headcount of Tarides up to 60+ people, all working
towards making OCaml the best language for any, and every project. Join our
team: https://tarides.com/


OCAML LABS

OCaml Labs has been at the forefront of innovation in OCaml for nearly a decade.
It was founded at the University of Cambridge by Prof. Anil Madhavapeddy in
2012, and developed into a spin-out consultancy company in 2016. OCaml Labs'
mission was to push OCaml and functional programming forward as a platform,
making it a more effective tool for all users (including large-scale industrial
deployments) while at the same time growing the appeal of the language to
broaden its applicability and popularity.

OCaml Labs has been instrumental in developing and maintaining the OCaml
platform for OCaml usage at an industrial scale. OCaml Labs contributed to the
development and maintenance of the opam package management ecosystem and of the
OCaml community website, https://ocaml.org. These sites act as hubs for the
OCaml community to showcase the state-of-the-art and facilitate innovation. A
new and improved version of the site has been released under beta this month. In
addition, OCaml Labs' most significant (and technically complex) project, OCaml
Multicore, will finally come to fruition this year. Work on this project began
in 2014, followed by award-winning papers and presentations in 2020, and the
announcement in late 2021 that Multicore will become part of the mainline OCaml
compiler.


TARIDES

Tarides is a tech start-up founded in Paris in 2018 by pioneers of programming
languages and cloud computing. They develop a software infrastructure platform
to deploy secure, distributed applications with strict resource constraints and
low-latency performance requirements. This platform builds upon innovative and
open-source projects such as MirageOS and Irmin and underpins mission-critical
deployments such as the Tezos blockchain, Citrix XenServer or Docker for
Desktop. In addition, Tarides uses unikernel technologies and applies the
research done in programming languages to real-world systems to build safe and
performant applications.

Tarides has been part of the Founder program of Station F in 2018. In addition,
it got selected in France for the “Concours d’Innovation i-Lab” organised by the
French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation in partnership with
Bpifrance. This national contest awards company creation and innovative
technologies. Tarides get awarded during the FIC 2020 fair (International
Cybersecurity Forum), the leading European cybersecurity event.