- Published on
ICFP 2025 Wrap-up
- Authors
- Name
- Chris Armstrong
This was my first time attending the ICFP 2025 conference in Singapore, and also speaking at a large conference.
Presenting on smaws at a functional programming conference
I was presenting on smaws, an AWS SDK for OCaml and Smithy code generator for the OCaml workshop. You can find my recorded session here. I also put together an extended abstract / paper of my presentation that you can read here.
On the conference itself
This was one of the major ACM programming languages conferences. The conference itself was absolutely huge, with two major conferences in the ACM SIGPLAN umbrella, SPLASH and ICFP, meeting together for the first time. There was several simultaneous workshops and tracks each day over 7 days (!).
You can see the full programme here - there was two co-located condferences with 20 language/topic based workshops and 2 co-hosted symposia. There is also recorded livestreams posted to this Youtube playlist.
If you're like me, and find some of the talks very specialised or academic (which for me was many of the OOPSLA papers presented), you may enjoy the papers from the ONWARD track, as these were very high level "ideas-based" presentations that were very accessible.
If you're after a particular paper/presentation from the conference, click through the abstract and paper may already be linked and available to download (otherwise these will be posted in the coming weeks by the organisers). If dealing with the Youtube playlist, you'll need to match the conference day and room and then scrub forward to the approximate session time.
My experience
As an attendee, it was very frantic running between sessions and trying to catch people in the hallways between sessions. Thankfully the venue had all our sessions very close to each other, but unfortunately the irregular timing between different tracks made it difficult to get to everything. I already have a small reading list of papers from some of the presentations I missed, and things mentioned from previous conferences I wouldn't mind checking out.
At the same time, it was lovely to meet so many people from the OCaml community from around the world and at so many different companies and research institutes, including a few places I did not know were using the language1.
Thank you to everyone who made me feel welcome and were generous with sharing their knowledge and experience with this OCaml hobbyist. You've all provided the encouragement to continue working on smaws and other OCaml projects I have been working on.
Footnotes
If you're one of those research institutions or companies where OCaml might not be that widely known, please post to the OCaml Forum or on the Discord with your work from time to time - it's always interesting, and I find all the contributions from this community are usually very high quality due to the nature of the people attracted to working with a well-designed but pragmatic programming language (and the reception is normally very positive). ↩