UDP Multicast in OCaml

Github Project: KFoxder/udp_multicast_examples OCaml and UDP multicast have been two recent focuses of mine as I prepare for my new role at Jane Street. As I was doing research on them I kept googling things like “OCaml Multicast Example” and realized I couldn’t find any good examples of UDP multicast in OCaml. Either they don’t exist or I am not capable of finding them.

So I went about creating my own examples for the next person who is interested in implementing UDP multicast in OCaml.

I decided I would implement it in 3 different ways. First, I did it without any concurrency. Then I used lwt, which is the most popular library in OCaml as well as async which is less popular but used by Jane Street so for me made sense to include and understand.

While I assume I will be working with async at JS (who knows, I haven’t started yet!) the lack of examples and in depth documentation besides RWO did make it harder to implement than lwt. This echos some of what I have read in the community discussions, I am sure there are more examples internally which will make it easier.

The most helpful resources I found while doing this were the following:

• Linux Documentation - Multicast
• Real World Ocaml - Concurrent Programming
• UDP Client and Server in OCaml
• UDP Multicast in C