Anil Madhavapeddy

Made the cover of @CACMmag with "A Decade of Docker Containers", recapping much systems work! Docker grew so fast in those early days that we never got a chance to write an academic paper about it, so this writeup has been a long time coming: cacm.acm.org/research/a-dec…. A heady mix of Go, OCaml, Swift, Linux, nested kernels, ancient network protocols like SLIRP, all mixed up into a container cauldron... The article also comes with cool art and a video interview that was a lot of fun to film around @pembroke1347 and my overgrown office. I left some musings on my blog too anil.recoil.org/notes/cacm-doc… with @mugofsoup and @justincormack

@ShriramKMurthi cmon, anyone would have been fooled by a multiunikeraml

Plot twist: Anil didn't recognize his *own* papers in the pile.

@Inapplicablu @yminsky Works fine, I published my oxcaml Claude skill anil.recoil.org/notes/aoah-202…

@yminsky Is there a significant difference in using oxcaml vs vanilla ocaml? And how do llms find using it? I’m a bit leery of oxcaml because sparse training data is already slightly annoying in normal ocaml. Do they take advantage of it, get confused, or just write vanilla ocaml?

OxCaml at work!

@ilyasergey @RanjitJhala @kc_srk I'm very much enjoying reading along with your adventures here

@RanjitJhala @kc_srk Thank you Ranjit! Indeed, we can finally use those nerdy proof tools as, what’s the word… assistants!

New on "Proofs and Intuitions": Verifying Move Borrow Checker in Lean: an Experiment in AI-Assisted PL Metatheory. proofsandintuitions.net/2026/03/18/mov… The gist: I formalised Move's type system in Lean: 39KLOC, under a month, with Claude. Person-years in PL research are now person-weeks.

Oh my god I am under no circumstances revealing the results I got for this test

Claude Code.

The OxCaml record heap size doing some of this is almost a terabyte so far. Must...break the 'mach 2' barrier next run

It's been a minute, but, time for another Signals and Threads, this one with Will Wilson about the testing tools he's building at @AntithesisHQ. And, in a bow to modernity, we have a video version of this one too!

Important and easily overlooked detail in the Chancellor’s Mais lecture today: a commitment to reform noncompetes. Noncompetes being unenforceable is one of the pillars of California’s tech success. This is especially important in UK if we want more AI startups. Promising.

@yminsky @AntithesisHQ How is the video opening not you playing the piano

TESSERA has a shiny new website up at geotessera.org! You can find more about the two global explorers, one hosted (tee.cl.cam.ac.uk) and one that streams purely in-browser using Zarr (tze.geotessera.org)

.@avsm builds insanely useful throwaway software github.com/avsm/ruminant which powers thicket.dev my goto place to know what's hapenning in the O(x)Caml land.

.plan-26-11: Bins, bollards, bots and biodiversity boffins at DEFRA anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w11

We've been working on migrating @geotessera embeddings to a cloud native format called Zarr v3, which unlocks all kinds of scifi usecases like mobile phone use and satellite streaming. I've made a note on how this works at anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-… and stuck up a preview of browser streaming on tze.geotessera.org

In a topical sidequest, today's OCaml app is fuel.mint.caelum.ci.dev - using the UK's new fuel finding API to find the cheapest gas nearby (and detect price gougers?) tunbury.org/2026/03/13/fue…

Addressing global biodiversity loss needs more than data collection. A new PNAS Perspective from the 2025 US–UK Scientific Forum outlines 9 changes to improve how biodiversity is measured and used for conservation. Read now: ow.ly/nAc150YsXUk Forum: ow.ly/U5ZV50YsUTK

Shout-out to Sai, who hacked across the stack -- writing OCaml for MirageOS unikernels, hacking on the OCaml and Clang compilers, hacking linkers, hacking firmware to get bare-metal setup, and hacking Bluespec to extend the Shakti RISC-V processor with security extensions!

Finally cracking CPU inference for TESSERA so it’s faster than our scarce GPUs, just needed a bit of OCaml and libnuma to get the memory placements right tunbury.org/2026/03/11/gpu…

My fave Tony Hoare memory is him agreeing to pop into my 1st year Cambridge Foundations of CS lecture when I introduced Quicksort and waving at the stunned students when I explained who he was - lots of them would have seen him around Cambridge and had no idea!

I'm cocooning into my happy place with a monorepo of oxcaml, sherlodoc, odoc and a horde of agents github.com/avsm/oxmono/pu…