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# Who is Dmitriy Kovalenko?

**[Game Engineering Podcast](https://daily.dev/sources/game_eng_podcast)** · 21 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Dmitriy Kovalenko, a Ukrainian-born software engineer now in San Francisco, shares his programming journey from Windows desktop apps and React/Material UI contributions to open source testing work at Cypress, low-level image comparison libraries written in Zig, video processing with FFmpeg, and eventually Rust backend development. He discusses his pragmatic view on language choice — using Python or JavaScript for scripts, Rust for safety-critical code, C for embedded firmware, and assembly for maximum performance. He also dives into OCaml's underrated performance characteristics, Jane Street's zerox-camel extension, and comments on Bun's decision to rewrite from Zig to Rust to address crashes and undefined behavior.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7MTb_zinTc>

## Questions this post answers

### How does OCaml's runtime performance compare to Go and Haskell?

OCaml is described as closer in performance to Go than to Haskell, since it has a fairly performant garbage collector and was designed with performance considerations, unlike Haskell where a single int can take two words of memory due to heavy boxing. OCaml's documentation includes guidance on tuning performance and reducing allocations, making it more performance-conscious than its purely functional reputation suggests.

_Developers weighing functional languages for performance-sensitive work can track these comparisons on daily.dev._

### What is OxCaml and how does it differ from standard OCaml?

OxCaml is an extension to OCaml created by Jane Street that makes memory allocations explicit, unboxes primitives and options (similar to Rust), and adds SIMD intrinsics, all while keeping the same OCaml language syntax but using a different compiler. The goal is giving developers more control over execution and performance without abandoning OCaml's syntax or ecosystem.

_Engineers evaluating low-level control in functional languages can follow developments like OxCaml on daily.dev._

### Why did Bun's creators block a developer on Twitter over crash comparisons?

A developer publicly stated that Bun has more crashes than Deno and Node.js combined, backing the claim with screenshots from Bun's GitHub issues, and was subsequently blocked by Bun's creator Jarred Sumner on Twitter. The claim points to undefined behavior and unresolved crash reports in Bun's issue tracker as evidence, tied to Bun being written in Zig without full control over every CPU instruction executed.

_Teams choosing a JavaScript runtime can weigh stability track records like this one on daily.dev._

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---

Tags: [#testing](https://daily.dev/tags/testing), [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#zig](https://daily.dev/tags/zig), [#cypress](https://daily.dev/tags/cypress), [#ocaml](https://daily.dev/tags/ocaml)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/who-is-dmitriy-kovalenko--mvnuawyfb)

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