We recently restructured our standard libraries at Jane Street in a way that eliminates the difference between Core_kernel and Core and we’re happy with the result. The new layout should reach the open source world before the end of the year.

Overview

For many years, Jane Street has had two variants of our Core standard library:

  • Core_kernel, which extends Base, and works on Javascript and Windows.

  • Core, which extends Core_kernel, adding functionality that uses the Unix library.

We eliminated the distinction between Core and Core_kernel by moving (mostly non-portable) functionality from Core out to standalone libraries, and then simply renamed Core_kernel as Core.

Rationale

The upsides of this change are clear enough:

  • It’s simpler. Instead of three different flavors of our standard library, there are just two, hopefully with clearer purposes.

  • It encourages portability. The fact that Core wouldn’t work on JavaScript and Windows meant that lots of libraries that could have been portable weren’t. This change should fix that.

This change is the culmination of work that has been going on for years. We had already moved most of the functionality out of Core, into either Core_kernel or to standalone libraries that depended on Core. In the end, there wasn’t that much code that distinguished Core from Core_kernel, so the change is smaller than it seems.

Hopefully, this all makes the differences between Base and Core clearer. In particular:

  • Base is lighter, much faster to compile, and more stable.
  • Core is more extensive, having both more useful libraries and data-structures, as well as some more useful functionality broadly integrated into it, like pervasive integration of bin_prot and base_quickcheck.

And both of them are fully portable.

Adapting code to the change

The recommended way to adapt code to this change is to replace Core_kernel with Core and then to build with deprecation errors enabled. We have left behind @@deprecated annotations throughout Core for functionality that was moved into standalone libraries. So, you should get deprecation messages if your code needs further updates.

For example, if you use Core.Date.format, you will get a deprecation message:

Error (alert deprecated): Core.Date.format
[since 2021-03] Use [Date_unix]

Here, Date_unix is the name of the new standalone library that extends Core.Date with Unix-dependent functionality, include Date_unix.format.

Here’s a list of the modules that moved from Core to a standalone library:

Old name New name
Core.Command Command_unix
Core.Date Date_unix
Core.Filename Filename_unix
Core.Signal Signal_unix
Core.Sys Sys_unix
Core.Thread Core_thread
Core.Time Time_unix
Core.Time_ns Time_ns_unix
Core.Unix Core_unix

Releasing this change in the main opam repository

This change is good but is not backward compatible. As a result, some care will be needed to release it into the opam repository. We have a few ideas for how to make the transition smoother, but we haven’t settled on a concrete plan yet. We plan to work more proactively on it starting from September.