Parallelism without panic: a user’s guide to multicore safety in OCaml

Bobkonf, March 13th 2026

Setup

There are several options to set up your environment to run the exercises in this repository, depending on your preferences and existing setup. All options will provide an environment with OCaml 5.4.0 and the necessary dependencies to run the exercises, including the TSan-enabled OCaml compiler for the relevant exercises.

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(Fastest option) Codespaces setup

You can run the exercises in your browser, using the provided devcontainer setup, in GitHub Codespaces. Just select “Create codespace on main” from the “Codespaces” tab in the “Code” menu. You'll get started in a few minutes.

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(20-30 minutes) Local setup

If you already have your own OCaml environment installed, clone this repository and see CONFIG for details

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(A few minutes) Local devcontainer setup

You need to clone this repository first.

VS Code

Launch the devcontainer in VS Code :

• CTRL+SHIFT+P
• select “Dev Containers: Reopen in Container”
• choose the first container (not the oxcaml one).

To close the container, select “Dev Containers: Reopen Folder Locally” from the same menu.

Other editors

Launch the devcontainer tool on the command line (requires npm), inside the clone:

• npm install -g @devcontainers/cli
• devcontainer up
• devcontainer exec opam switch

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Remote Codespace (CLI)

You can also use the gh tool: gh codespace ssh (if you haven't created a codespace in your browser, you can do it using gh codespace create lyrm/bobkonf2026)