OCaml Weekly News

Greetings Cameleers,

Today, we are excited to share with you a first glance at some redactional work that has been brewing behind at the scenes at OCamlPro for quite a some time now!

We are starting a series of blogposts on the Flambda2 project. The goals are plenty, one of them being to give all readers an idea of the inner workings of this great piece of software, 10 years of research & development in the making.

The first two episodes are rather special to the series:

• Episode 0 gives context and broader information on both the Flambda2 Optimising Compiler project, and the series of blogposts itself.
• Episode 1, on the other hand, steps right into the subject at hand and covers some of the foundational design decisions of this compiler.

We await your feedback below, and hope that you will enjoy reading these posts, and all ensuing ones!

Kind regards, The OCamlPro Team

I'm happy to announce the release of Eio 1.0, its first major release. Eio started as an experimental effects-based library by the same team that was working on Multicore OCaml. We did not initially plan on upstreaming effects with OCaml 5.0. However, thanks to the efforts from the multicore team and OCaml core developers, effect handlers shipped with OCaml 5.0 (making it one of the first mainstream languages to do so). This presented the opportunity to develop effect-based concurrency libraries for OCaml, and Eio was the first of the lot..

Find more about the journey of Eio in this post – Eio 1.0 Release: Introducing a new Effects-Based I/O Library for OCaml

This is the beginning of the journey towards effect-based schedulers! We are keen to hear from you all to shape up what would be Eio 2.0.

If you're looking to get started with Eio, the README is a good place to start. Additionally, @talex5's video introduction, and tutorial to port your Lwt applications to Eio serve as good primers.

I'd like to thank all the contributors for their work and users for their thoughtful feedback. As always, happy to hear feedback about Eio.

Happy hacking!

Happy to announce ppx_minidebug 1.5.0. It should soon propagate to the opam repository. Two new features since 1.4.0:

• [%log_entry header_string; body...] syntax to explicitly create log subtrees without polluting with source location information. Note that if you want the source location you could always do let _for_debug : type... = body... in....

• Minimalistic flame graphs. Example:

  

  (Note that the output is very configurable, e.g. by default the at elapsed time information is not printed.)

Are you an academic user of OCaml?

By sharing your testimonial, you're not only showcasing your expertise and experience but also contributing to the OCaml community.

Your insights can help prospective users understand the academic value of OCaml and inspire them to explore its potential further.

Your testimonial will be featured on our academic user page, inspiring others to explore OCaml's potential.

Tell us:

1. Your name and academic affiliation.
2. A brief description of how you’ve used OCaml in your academic endeavors.
3. Your thoughts on the benefits and challenges of using OCaml.

Thanks

OCaml.org Team

Some years ago, I wrote a testimonial in an invited paper:

Chemoinformatics and structural bioinformatics in OCaml https://jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13321-019-0332-0

Dear all,

We are looking for motivated people to be members of the ICFP 2024 Artifact Evaluation Committee (AEC). Students, researchers and people from the industry or the free software community are all welcome. The artifact evaluation process aims to improve the quality and reproducibility of research artifacts for ICFP papers. In case you want to nominate someone else (students, colleagues, etc.), please send them the nomination form.

Nomination form: https://forms.gle/KJAjtDzhm5VLxjVf9

Deadline for nominations: Mon April 8th 2024

For more information, see the AEC webpage: https://icfp24.sigplan.org/track/icfp-2024-artifact-evaluation

The primary responsibility of committee members is to review the artifacts submitted corresponding to the already conditionally accepted papers in the main research track. In particular, run the associated tool or benchmark, check whether the results in the paper can be reproduced, and inspect the tool and the data.

We expect evaluation of one artifact to take about a full day. Each committee member will receive 2 to 3 artifacts to review.

All of the AEC work will be done remotely/online. The AEC will work in June, with the review work happening between June 5th and July 5th.

Come join us in improving the quality of research in our field!

Best, the Artifact Evaluation chairs: Quentin Stiévenart and Benoît Montagu

Nearly two months after the first alpha release, the release of OCaml 5.2.0 is drawing near.

We have thus released a first beta version of OCaml 5.2.0 to help you update your softwares and libraries ahead of the release (see below for the installation instructions).

Compared to the alpha release, this beta contains a majority of runtime system fixes, and a handful of other fixes across many subsystems.

Overall, the opam ecosystem looks in a good shape for the first beta release. Most core development tools support OCaml 5.2.0 or have compatibility patch under review (for odoc and ocamlformat), and you can follow the last remaining wrinkles on the opam readiness for 5.2.0 meta-issue.

If you find any bugs, please report them on OCaml's issue tracker.

Currently, the release is planned for the end of April or the beginning of May.

If you are interested in full list of features and bug fixes of the new OCaml version, the updated change log for OCaml 5.2.0 is available on GitHub.

opam update
opam switch create 5.2.0~beta1

Here are links from many OCaml blogs aggregated at the ocaml.org blog.

• Eio 1.0 Release: Introducing a new Effects-Based I/O Library for OCaml
• CPS Representation and Foundational Design Decisions in Flambda2
• The Flambda2 Snippets, Episode 0