[gnuvince]

The equivalent `plus2` OCaml function compiles to:

    camlAdd__plus2_1030:
    .L100:
    	addq	$4, %rax
    	ret

(It's using 4 instead of 2, because ints are boxed; a 0 in the last bit denotes an int, a 1 denotes an address).

[PaulAJ]

Part of the point of the original article is that not even assembler is "close to the metal" any more. How long does that fragment of assembly code take to execute? Depends on whether the instructions are in the I-cache, whether some previous branch prediction has failed, and whether the data are in the cache. All this adds up to a couple of orders of magnitude.

[haberman]

That's cool and OCaml is an interesting language. However I'm sure you know it would not be difficult to come up with a different example where C lets you express "bare metal" idioms that are not as "bare metal" when expressed in OCaml.