Interaction Nets in OCaml

Interaction nets are a visual programming language built upon graph rewriting. This project holds the code for example nets encoded in the OCaml programming language. You can find the encoded examples in the /examples folder.

Publication

This repository is a companion to the following paper:

An Encoding of Interaction Nets in OCaml, Nikolaus Huber & Wang Yi (GCM 2024)

Getting started

In order to use the provided code you need to install a compatible OCaml environment. The easiest way of doing so is with opam:

git clone https://github.com/nikolaushuber/ocaml_inets.git 
cd ocaml_inets 
opam switch create . -y  
dune build 

You can now run the built examples:

./_build/default/examples/fib.exe <n> <num domains> 
./_build/default/examples/qsort.exe <list size> <num domains> <seed> 
./_build/default/examples/msort.exe <list size> <num domains> <seed> 

Recreating the graphs from the paper

In order to recreate the benchmark graphs from the paper you will need the following software packages installed:

• python + matplotlib + numpy
• make
• bash
• hyperfine
• perf

If all of the above are installed, you can issue

make benchmark 

in the root of this repository. This will create a folder results holding all the images. You may have to first adapt the values in the beginning of Makefile to fit your particular processor.

If you would like to recreate the tool comparison graph, you can issue

make tool_comparison 

in the root of this repository. This needs inpla and HINet installed (see below). You will also have to change the paths to those programs in the beginning of Makefile.

License

MIT. Benchmark inputs for inpla and HINet are under their own licenses, a copy is in the respective folder.

Other interaction net projects

• inpla, currently the most performant general interaction net evaluator
• ingpu, an interaction evaluator using GPUs. Needs all interaction rules encoded as CUDA kernels
• HINet, an interaction net evaluator written in Haskell
• HVM, a virtual machine written in Rust designed to execute interaction nets