ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Scale By the Bay 2019 is held on November 13-15 in sunny Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt: https://scale.bythebay.io. Join us!
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As a trading firm, Jane Street needs the ability to work collaboratively on quantitative models, with many users defining, modifying, debugging, and viewing the results in real-time. These models need to be scalable, both in terms of performance and in terms of the understandability of the resulting system.
We will discuss some traditional approaches to this problem in the financial industry, as well the system we built for this case, called Webs. Webs uses a graph-based computational model specified using OCaml as a metalanguage to allow for concise description of programs, while still making the models easy to inspect, customize and debug. This is coupled with a parallel, incremental, evaluation engine for real-time results efficiently.
Yaron Minsky joined Jane Street back in 2002, and claims the dubious honor of having convinced the firm to start using OCaml. He also spends way too much time teaching his kids how to program.