Are the plans for typed algebraic effects solidifying, or are they still nebulous? Concretely, are you willing to take a guess as to when we are expected to see OCaml 6? ;-)
Thanks for the reply. I hope that the array and list comprehensions land soon in upstream; it's a useful and hopefully not-too-controversial feature.
I'm more ambivalent regarding the local allocations and the unboxed types. I totally understand why they'd be useful when you are trying to squeeze every last drop of performance, but they do require a not-so-trivial complexification of the language.
The local types are less invasive than the full support for typed effects. In particular, they are opt-in and associated complexity is pay-as-you-go. In my initial experiments, they seemed pretty nice to program with.
The type system for algebraic effects is still in the research and design phase at this point.
Right now, I am not even taking a guess of what will be the defining new major features of OCaml 6 (effect system + modular implicits maybe? Maybe not?).
Thanks for the reply. I'm hoping that modular macros land soon. I'm very ambivalent about the PPX mechanism, and I hope that modular macros reduces the need of PPX.
There are other cool stuff that is being worked on, which I am very excited about: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/jane-street-compiler-development.... Hopefully, we will see many of these make it into OCaml 6.