Jane Street's "extremely popular" new OCAML feature is in Python, but not C++
Jane Street's interns all have special projects issued to them, and the electronic trading firm seems to love offering a chance to improve its favorite coding language, OCAML. The most recent example, labelled tuples, is a feature that makes structured data easier to read, and is one that other functional programming languages don't seem to have.
The feature was built by 2024 intern Ryan Tjoa who previously interned at both Hudson River Trading and Meta. In the abstract for an upcoming session at tomorrow's international conference on functional programming, Jane Street says structured tuples allow coders "to give a helpful name to constructed values where labeled function arguments permit giving a helpful name to parameters." Oftentimes, making code as efficient and low-latency as possible can result in hard to decipher code; the new tuple function can make code more readable and documented, thus safer in principle.
Jane Street's coders have apparently taken to the labelled tuple feature in OCAML with enthusiasm. The abstract says "it has proven extremely popular and quickly found wide use in our code base." Nailen Matschke, a Jane Street software engineer of six years, concurs that the feature has seen "rapid adoption."
Tuples, which group multiple pieces of data together under a single value, are in use in other functional programming languages, but not in the same way. C++, for example, has structured bindings, which can unpack tuples into named variables, and do the same for arrays and structures. Structured bindings can be hard to implement across a large code base, as they only exist in the area in which they're declared.
Rust, meanwhile, has tuple structs. These are similar to both named tuples and to structs - which are another type of compound data. However, tuple structs must be defined prior to their use.
Jane Street's abstract seems to suggest the new labelled tuples can be used on the fly, making them more flexible.
Labelled tuples are, however, available in another language: Python. Named tuples were a part of Python 2.6, which released way back in 2008. But Python is often unable to match the latencies achieved by functional programming languages, which have more low-level control.
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