OCaml Weekly News

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 v0.4.0 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.

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!

https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/pull/13877

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?

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.

• https://github.com/rossberg/camp

This is an MP3 player that claims to have good library management - maybe worth a comparison.

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

Hi there!

I’m happy to report the release of ocaml-posix version 4.0.0: https://github.com/savonet/ocaml-posix

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!

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