OCaml (also SML) has a really powerful module system; it's so powerful that to call it a "module" system is maybe misleading to the average developer. You might think of a "module" system as a way of dividing your program into different files, and the ML module system certainly subsumes that case, but it goes beyond that.
The key to this is that modules in ML are actually kind of a separate programming language. Not only can you define modules, you can define "functor modules" - modules that are kind of like functions; you can pass modules as arguments to functors to produce new modules. And there's a (structural!) type system here, too: the modules a functor can accept are specified to have a specific structure, and if you try to pass an incompatible module to a functor you get a type error.
(Incidentally: the naming of functors in the module system is really unfortunate here, because it overlaps with the name of functors in category theory/Haskell.)
This sounds extremely abstract and kind of insane; it's easier to understand it in practice. A typical example might be that you want to define a hash table, which requires some kind of hash operation for a key. What you'd do idiomatically in ML is define a HashTable functor which takes, as an argument, a module X consisting of a type t and and a hash function. This would generate a HashTable(X) module specialized to that particular key type.
What's interesting here is that there's an overlap here with things like interfaces in Java or typeclasses in Haskell, where your HashTable type would demand that the key type adheres to a Hashable interface. It turns out they're kind of (kind of!) just different takes on the same thing. There's even some interest in the OCaml world in trying to "close the gap" with a feature called "modular implicits" [0].
The other thing to know is that there's an esoteric feature of Haskell called "Backpack", which is an attempt to bring the ML module system to Haskell. It's not exactly widely used or anything like that, but it's there and been in GHC for several years now.
This article is basically just demonstrating how Backpack lets you use modules in much the same way as you'd traditionally use typeclasses in Haskell.
OCaml (also SML) has a really powerful module system; it's so powerful that to call it a "module" system is maybe misleading to the average developer. You might think of a "module" system as a way of dividing your program into different files, and the ML module system certainly subsumes that case, but it goes beyond that.
The key to this is that modules in ML are actually kind of a separate programming language. Not only can you define modules, you can define "functor modules" - modules that are kind of like functions; you can pass modules as arguments to functors to produce new modules. And there's a (structural!) type system here, too: the modules a functor can accept are specified to have a specific structure, and if you try to pass an incompatible module to a functor you get a type error.
(Incidentally: the naming of functors in the module system is really unfortunate here, because it overlaps with the name of functors in category theory/Haskell.)
This sounds extremely abstract and kind of insane; it's easier to understand it in practice. A typical example might be that you want to define a hash table, which requires some kind of hash operation for a key. What you'd do idiomatically in ML is define a HashTable functor which takes, as an argument, a module X consisting of a type t and and a hash function. This would generate a HashTable(X) module specialized to that particular key type.
What's interesting here is that there's an overlap here with things like interfaces in Java or typeclasses in Haskell, where your HashTable type would demand that the key type adheres to a Hashable interface. It turns out they're kind of (kind of!) just different takes on the same thing. There's even some interest in the OCaml world in trying to "close the gap" with a feature called "modular implicits" [0].
The other thing to know is that there's an esoteric feature of Haskell called "Backpack", which is an attempt to bring the ML module system to Haskell. It's not exactly widely used or anything like that, but it's there and been in GHC for several years now.
This article is basically just demonstrating how Backpack lets you use modules in much the same way as you'd traditionally use typeclasses in Haskell.
[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jdy22/papers/modular-implicits.pdf
Thank you for such a concise summary. I had no idea that types in ocaml are that powerful.