Retrofitting parallelism onto OCaml / Aug 2020
Won best paper award at ICFP 2020 for our paper on retrofitting parallelism onto OCaml! This was the culmination of years of work with KC Sivaramakrishnan, Stephen Dolan, Leo White and the multicore team. The paper presented a mostly-concurrent garbage collector that maintained backwards compatibility for sequential code while enabling true parallelism. The achievement was maintaining both feature compatibility and performance for existing single-threaded programs while scaling admirably on multicore processors - a balancing act that required novel GC techniques and careful engineering.