Hacking the OCaml Compiler to Add Type Reflection

At LexiFi, we maintain a fork of the official OCaml compiler extended with support for type reflection. This is an powerful approach that largely supplants and improves on PPX for many tasks.

While our fork is not open source, the approach using type reflection deserves to be better known. With that in mind, this workshop will explain some of the main ideas involved by implementing a toy version of type reflection in the upstream compiler. Participants will be assumed to be conversant in OCaml but not to have any prior experience with compilers/types/etc and anyone interested in getting started hacking the OCaml compiler is welcome to come!