I gave a short talk introducing Takibi at OCaml Meeting 2026 in Tokyo.
This was the first time I had presented Takibi publicly, either online or in person. Takibi is still a small and experimental project, so the talk was not intended as an announcement of a mature language or operating system. It was simply an opportunity to share what I have been exploring.
Takibi is a programming language implemented in OCaml using LLVM. I am developing it together with a small Unix-like kernel as an experiment in moving kernel errors from runtime to compile time. The kernel also serves as a practical workload: patterns found while implementing drivers, networking, memory management, and system calls reveal which language features are actually needed.
In the talk, I briefly introduced two examples from the network driver: representing NIC operations as a capability state machine, and tying packet slices to descriptor ownership. I also talked about how generative AI helped build the compiler and kernel, where human judgment was still essential, and one remaining difficulty around DWARF support in LLVM’s OCaml bindings.
Takibi has a long way to go, but I was happy to give it its first public introduction at an OCaml meeting. OCaml has been a quiet and reliable foundation for continuously changing the language design while keeping the compiler manageable.
The slides and source code are available here:
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