OCaml Weekly News

Hello everyone! I've just published my first midpoint Outreachy blog post about my progress contributing to Dune. You can read it here: https://medium.com/@mattidungafa/outreachy-internship-midpoint-post-f9333c9c3c86. Stay tuned for more updates!

Version 0.9 of qcheck-lin, qcheck-stm, and qcheck-multicoretests-util is now available from your favorite opam repository! :tada:

The 0.9 release contains adjustments to the public interface of Lin in order to make it compatible with 5.5.0+trunk and also switches the Util.Pp pretty printers to use QCheck.Print for consistency:

• #566: Use QCheck.Print combinators in Util.Pp too for consistency, e.g., to avoid that STM argument and result printer outputs differ.
• #562: Fix the int32 and int64 printers in both Lin and STM to add missing l and L suffixes on literals.
• #560: Change Lin.{constructible,deconstructible} from an empty variant type to an abstract type to get Lin compiling on 5.5.0+trunk again, due to ocaml/ocaml#13994 removing special handling of abstract and empty variants defined in the current module.

Happy testing! :smiley:

I just published a blog post about CRs Workflows, a new open source tool for managing code review comments embedded in source code, with reusable GitHub Actions workflows. If you’re interested in trying it out or sharing feedback, you can read more here: https://mbarbin.github.io/crs/blog/launching-crs-workflows/.

Thank you!

There is a great paper distilling several different build systems (Make, Excel, Bazel, etc.) into a unified framework. One of its authors is on the Dune team (I think). If you want to understand or write build systems, it is a good read because it uses language that can be understood by non-academics:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-functional-programming/article/build-systems-a-la-carte-theory-and-practice/097CE52C750E69BD16B78C318754C7A4

All of its examples are in Haskell so I wrote a version in OCaml. Most of my OCaml translation was aided by the English paragraphs rather than the Haskell code (the latter was hieroglyphics to me). Regardless, I’m fairly sure some of the concepts don’t translate to OCaml well.

If you are interested in build systems, the first place to start is the test directory https://gitlab.com/dkml/build-tools/MlFront/-/tree/V2_4/tests/MlFront_Thunk?ref_type=heads (the alacarte_*.ml modules). The tests correspond to the paper’s section numbers, although there are also alacarte_x*.ml tests where I extended the framework. Then you can scan the source code at https://gitlab.com/dkml/build-tools/MlFront/-/tree/V2_4/src/MlFront_Thunk?ref_type=heads (the Build*.ml and Promise.ml modules).

PRs welcome!

Greetings!

We are planning to host the first Dream development video call with @sabine on Discord on Friday, 8 August, at 9:00 AM Berlin time.

Please join #webdev on the OCaml Discord if you’d like to participate. I will handle questions about joining the meeting there. We will probably use one of the voice chat channels on the server (which supports video).

The topic of the meeting will be discussing open PRs and getting them ready for merge by our collective efforts, and needed improvements. We would like to put off conceptual and strategic discussions until the very end of the meeting, or to a future date.

And please bear with us as we figure out what platform is best to use and how to use it :) We can’t promise that the first meeting will go without any issues, but we will work out everything based on experience :)

Hope to see you there!

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

• Upcoming OCaml Events
• Adventures with BuildKit