Xavier Leroy

Who is Xavier Leroy?

Xavier Leroy is a French computer scientist and programmer. He is best known for his role as a primary developer of the OCaml system. He is senior scientist at the French government research institution INRIA.

Leroy was admitted to the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1987, where he studied mathematics and computer science. From 1989 to 1992 he did his PhD in computer science under the supervision of Gérard Huet.

He is an internationally recognized expert on functional programming languages and compilers. In recent years, he has taken an interest in formal methods, formal proofs and certified compilation. He is the leader of CompCert project that develops an optimizing compiler for C, formally verified in Coq.

Leroy was also the original author of LinuxThreads, the most widely-used threading package for Linux versions prior to 2.6. Linux 2.6 introduced NPTL, with much more extensive support from the kernel, to replace LinuxThreads.