Hello Here is the latest OCaml Weekly News, for the week of December 30, 2025 to January 06, 2026. Table of Contents ───────────────── Announcing the first release of Alice, a radical OCaml build system OCaml/opam package manager support for Dependabot - I need your help shakuhachi 0.1.0 - A music collection manager .mlx syntax dialect ocaml-posix release 4.0.0 Other OCaml News Old CWN Announcing the first release of Alice, a radical OCaml build system ═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════ Archive: Continuing this thread, Steve Sherratt announced ──────────────────────────────────────────────── [Alice v0.3.0] is out! This introduces a breaking change which is that Alice now follows the [XDG Base Directory Spec] in lieu of creating a `~/.alice' directory. To migrate from an older version: • Delete `~/.alice'. • If you have a block in your shell config starting with `# BEGIN configuration from Alice installer', remove that block. • If you installed Alice with the installation script then run the script again (instructions [here]). • If you used Alice to install OCaml tools, you'll need to reinstall those tools (run `alice tools install'). • If you've configured a custom sandbox template with Visual Studio Code for any Alice projects, change the template based on the new LSP instructions for Visual Studio Code [here]. To enable bash/zsh completions for Alice, source the appropriate file from `~/.local/share/alice/env'. [Alice v0.3.0] [XDG Base Directory Spec] [here] [here] Steve Sherratt later added ────────────────────────── [Alice v0.4.0] is out. The main change is that package manifests now use [KDL] instead of TOML. See [this post] for the motivation for this change. There's a migration guide [here]. [Alice v0.4.0] [KDL] [this post] [here] OCaml/opam package manager support for Dependabot - I need your help ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════ Archive: Jakub Polak announced ───────────────────── Hello OCaml community! 😊 Let's kick off the new year with something exciting! I just created a Pull Request to dependabot-core that adds support for Opam in OCaml. This could be super useful for all of us using this ecosystem in our projects! But the Dependabot maintainers emphasized that maintaining new ecosystems requires community support (check their comment here: [https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/pull/13711#issuecomment-3659899321]). They already have 3 community-maintained ecosystems and want more, but only if the community helps with long-term updater support. They will be looking for volunteers to help maintain this – in testing, fixes, or ongoing maintenance. We can push this together if you really want it. What do you think? [https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/pull/13711#issuecomment-3659899321] shakuhachi 0.1.0 - A music collection manager ═════════════════════════════════════════════ Archive: EruEri announced ──────────────── Dear all, I humbly announce shakuhachi `0.1.0`. Shakuhachi is a music collection manager. It aims to be a rather simple collection manager extensible by plugins. It organizes musics into an artist/album directory structure, can handle multiple collections and provides a mechanism similar to `GitHub - beetbox/beet' for querying a collection. Shakuhachi also exposes some of its internals which allows to hook it inside other applications. You can visit the source code at [codeberg - erueri/shakuhachi]. You can also see an example of integrating shakuhachi inside a C++ music player [codeberg - erueri/audacious-skhc-plugin]. Sincerely yours. [codeberg - erueri/shakuhachi] [codeberg - erueri/audacious-skhc-plugin] Christian Lindig later said ─────────────────────────── • This is an MP3 player that claims to have good library management - maybe worth a comparison. .mlx syntax dialect ═══════════════════ Archive: Continuing this thread, Andrey Popp announced ───────────────────────────────────────────── Some updates from .mlx team (@davesnx and me): • mlx 0.11 is released, OCaml 5.4 support + some lexer improvements • ocamlformat-mlx 0.28.1 is released, OCaml 5.4 support + formatting improvements • ocaml-lsp-server and vscode’s OCaml Platform extension now have first class support for .mlx ocaml-posix release 4.0.0 ═════════════════════════ Archive: Romain Beauxis announced ──────────────────────── Hi there! I’m happy to report the release of `ocaml-posix' version `4.0.0': This collection of modules was started some time ago with the goal of centralizing and normalizing the patterns for binding constants, types (including C `stuct' ) and functions from the POSIX standard using `ctypes'. The goal is to offer: • A common set of tools and practices for structuring and binding using `ctypes'. • APIs and modules suitable for low-level `ctypes' use. • High level APIs and modules suitable for direct OCaml use. • Multi platform compatibility: `*BSD', `linux', `macos' and ~windows~when available. • Cross-platform compilation using `dune''s awesome cross-compilation support when applicable (currently only `posix-errno~and ~posix-socket') With this release, 4 new modules have been added: • `posix-errno' to deal with unix error numbers. Although there are some alternatives already existing, this one is a more straight-forward and modern implementation using `dune' for building with cross-compilation and multi-platform support. • `posix-stat', `posix-resource' and the extensive `posix-unistd'. Hopefully these modules can be useful to more developers and provide a common platform for interfacing OCaml programs with system calls in a portable and extensible way! FAQ: ╌╌╌╌ • Why is this not using `dune''s direct support for `ctypes'? Cross-compilation support requires running binary compiled for the target (e.g. `windows') on the host (e.g. `linux') in order to extract specific data points such as C constants values and C struct entries offset. Currently, this is not supported using `dune'' builtin `ctypes' support. However, support for this is [being worked on]. [being worked on] Other OCaml News ════════════════ From the ocaml.org blog ─────────────────────── Here are links from many OCaml blogs aggregated at [the ocaml.org blog]. • [I Cannot SSH Into My Server Anymore (And That’s Fine)] • [Multi Domain OCaml on Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Microcontroller] [the ocaml.org blog] [I Cannot SSH Into My Server Anymore (And That’s Fine)] [Multi Domain OCaml on Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Microcontroller] Old CWN ═══════ If you happen to miss a CWN, you can [send me a message] and I'll mail it to you, or go take a look at [the archive] or the [RSS feed of the archives]. If you also wish to receive it every week by mail, you may subscribe to the [caml-list]. [Alan Schmitt] [send me a message] [the archive] [RSS feed of the archives] [caml-list] [Alan Schmitt]