Build Systems

with Andrey Mokhov

September 16th, 2020  |  57:46

Most software engineers only think about their build system when it breaks; and yet, this often unloved piece of software forms the backbone of every serious project. This week, Ron has a conversation with Andrey Mokhov about build systems, from the venerable Make to Bazel and beyond. Andrey has a lot of experience in this field, including significant contributions to the replacement for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler’s Make-based system and Build Systems à la carte, a paper that untangles the complex ecosystem of existing build systems. Ron and Andrey muse on questions like why every language community seems to have its own purpose-built system and, closer to home, where Andrey and the rest of the build systems team at Jane Street are focusing their efforts.

Programmable Hardware

with Andy Ray

September 9th, 2020  |  59:18

The ever-widening availability of FPGAs has opened the door to solving a broad set of performance-critical problems in hardware. In this episode, Ron speaks with Andy Ray, who leads Jane Street’s hardware design team. Andy has a long career prior to Jane Street shipping hardware designs for things like modems and video codecs. That work led him to create Hardcaml, a domain-specific language for expressing hardware designs. Ron and Andy talk about the current state-of-the-art in hardware tooling, the economics of FPGAs, and how the process of designing hardware can be improved by applying lessons from software engineering.

Hardcaml itself is open-source software available on Github, along with a collection of associated libraries and tools. Andy has also given a talk on Hardcaml called OCaml All The Way Down, and has a post on Jane Street's blog about some of the testing techniques used with Hardcaml.

Introducing Signals & Threads

with Ron Minsky

September 2nd, 2020  |  00:47