I worked professionally in OCaml for many years, and I assure you it’s possible to write low latency code by avoiding allocations. People write Java this way as well. Lots of system software was written in OCaml this way. It looks a little un-idiomatic compared to regular OCaml code but really what’s going on is that it’s just a specific low-latency idiom. Don’t create structs, don’t match on options. Weird, right? But it works.
Some of the code also did networking in user space and communicated with other processes by coordinating writes to shared memory.
It’s true that there’s certain system software that you probably can’t write because of the presence of a GC: parts of the operating system, a language runtime, a virtualization toolkit. The category “system software” contains those things but also databases, browsers, and servers.
Some of the code also did networking in user space and communicated with other processes by coordinating writes to shared memory.
It’s true that there’s certain system software that you probably can’t write because of the presence of a GC: parts of the operating system, a language runtime, a virtualization toolkit. The category “system software” contains those things but also databases, browsers, and servers.