Saving lives with ReasonML

For stroke patients, there is a saying “time is brain”. First responders need to assess patients as accurately and as quickly as possible, and then it’s off to the races to the best treatment centre. This is a high stakes situation where problems arising of both the human and software variety is ideally zero. Losing a loved one because “undefined is not a function” is certainly not ideal.

It should not be a surprise that eliminating the occurrence of such software defects in such a high stakes application is of paramount importance. We recently rewrote the core of our first responder stroke triage mobile application in ReasonML and Bucklescript to achieve the necessary safety guarantees that only the ML family of languages can provide. In this talk, I share details of how we undertook this task and lessons learnt along the way.

About the speaker:

Douglas is a software engineer currently working at Allm Inc. in Japan. He develops backend services with Ruby, and webapp frontends with various compile-to-JavaScript languages. He has also published open source macOS apps.