OCaml Weekly News

Hello fellow users of OCaml, If you or your students have defended a PhD in 2025 on a topic related to functional programming, then you may apply for the (new) Richard Bird Distinguished Dissertation Award. Announcement copied below.

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CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

Richard Bird Distinguished Dissertation Award 2025

Deadline: 31st August 2026

http://tinyurl.com/jfp-bird-award

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OVERVIEW

The Journal of Functional Programming is pleased to establish the Richard Bird Distinguished Dissertation Award, to recognise an outstanding PhD dissertation in functional programming.

Richard Bird (1943-2022) was one of the leading figures in functional programming. He was a Professor in Oxford, where he founded the Algebra of Programming group, and served as Director of the Computing Laboratory. Richard is renowned for his many books and pearls on functional programming, which set a lasting standard for clear and elegant writing. It seems fitting that an award be established in his name to further encourage these values in the field.

The award includes a prize of £1,000. Funding for the prize is supported by a generous donation from Richard himself to further the cause of functional programming.

CRITERIA

Eligible dissertations must have been completed in 2025. Depending on the institution, this may be the date of the viva, corrections being approved, graduation ceremony, or otherwise.

The award is open to all topics within the remit of JFP, with a particular emphasis on dissertations that reflect Richard's own values of clarity, simplicity and elegance. For a dissertation to be considered for the award it should:

• Reach a high standard of exposition;
• Make a noteworthy contribution to the subject;
• Place the results in the wider context of computer science.

NOMINATIONS

Please submit the following information to the award chair, graham.hutton@nottingham.ac.uk, by 31st August 2026:

• Two letters of support, explaining why the dissertation should be considered for the award. One letter should be from the advisor/supervisor, and one from an independent source with no conflict of interest with the candidate, such as an external examiner or other expert in the field.
• A copy of the dissertation itself.

AWARD COMMITTEE

• Graham Hutton (chair), University of Nottingham
• Matthew Flatt, University of Utah
• Jeremy Gibbons, University of Oxford
• François Pottier, INRIA
• Wouter Swierstra, University of Utrecht
• Ningning Xie, University of Toronto

The JFP editors-in-chief serve as observers of the committee.

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Hey y'all, last year I gave a workshop on observability at Fun OCaml, and a few folks asked me what was available for continuous profiling, and I wasn't aware of any solutions that supported OCaml directly.

Since then I got the opportunity to work on one, and put it into use in production over at Semgrep, and now after battle testing it for a few months I'm happy to announce Pyro Caml is now available, and on opam.

I got a good excuse to use a lot of cool OCaml tools like ocaml-rs, the runtime event system, and memprof, so needless to say it was a bunch of fun to write this :slight_smile: . If you're interested in the details I have a blog post here covering them.

Currently it only supports CPU profiling, but we're potentially going to add memory/gc profiling in the coming months. Enjoy!

Greetings OCaml enjoyers,

Have you been annoyed with terraform plan telling you 10 minutes later that you have a typo? Are you frustrated with how type-ambiguous your cloud is? (Abe Simpson shaking fist at cloud)

Or, maybe you wish you could have AWS libraries inside an ecosystem you trust.

Well, this release is for you!

I'm happy to announce awso, a comprehensive AWS library. This was forked from https://github.com/solvuu/awsm, which was never released to opam. awso provides typed OCaml bindings to AWS services generated from botocore's service definitions, so the compiler catches the typos and shape mismatches.

The awso repo: https://github.com/mbacarella/ocaml-awso

(* ec2_describe_instances.ml *)
module Ec2 = Awso_ec2_eio

let print_row a b c d = Printf.printf "%-16s  %-15s  %-39s  %-20s\n" a b c d

let print_instance instance =
  let name =
    Option.bind instance.Ec2.Instance.tags (fun tags ->
      List.find_map
        (function
          | { Ec2.Tag.key = Some "Name"; value = Some v } -> Some v
          | _ -> None)
        tags)
  in
  let instance_type =
    match instance.instanceType with
    | Some it -> Ec2.InstanceType.to_string it
    | None -> ""
  in
  print_row
    instance_type
    (Option.value instance.publicIpAddress ~default:"")
    (Option.value instance.ipv6Address ~default:"")
    (Option.value name ~default:"")
;;

let main env =
  let cfg = Awso_eio.Cfg.get_exn ~env () in
  match Ec2.describe_instances ~cfg (Ec2.DescribeInstancesRequest.make ()) with
  | Error e ->
    failwith
      (Printf.sprintf
         "Ec2.describe_instances: %s"
         (Yojson.Safe.to_string (Ec2.Ec2_error.to_json e)))
  | Ok { reservations; _ } -> (
    let instances =
      reservations
      |> Option.value ~default:[]
      |> List.concat_map (function
        | { Ec2.Reservation.instances = None; _ } -> []
        | { instances = Some instances; _ } -> instances)
    in
    match instances with
    | [] -> print_endline "no instances"
    | instances ->
      print_row "instance-type" "public ipv4" "public ipv6" "name";
      print_row
        (String.make 16 '-')
        (String.make 15 '-')
        (String.make 39 '-')
        (String.make 20 '-');
      List.iter print_instance instances)
;;

let () = Eio_main.run main

Hey y'all 🙋‍♂️

I've been messing around with a port of OCaml 4.14.3 for Plan 9:

https://github.com/dharmatech/ocaml

The native compiler isn't supported yet. Just bytecode support, repl, etc.

The website is now live at https://ocaml.org/ocaml-workshop-2026. Please refer to it for the latest information!

The submission deadline is roughly three weeks away! Please consider submitting your work.

The recipient of the grants are:

• OCaml bindings for GTK 4 by Chris Armstrong
• LSP for menhir by Federico Dal Pio Luogo
• Programmable Patterns for OCaml by the team of Ningning Xie in the University of Toronto
• Update the WebAuthn OCaml library to specification level 3 from level 2 (2021) by Robur
• Modernizing ocp-indent for OCaml 5.x by ocamlpro
• Maintenance and Development of the Dream Web Framework by Sebastian Willenbrink,
• Introspectable OCaml, an OCaml variant (compile-time options) which provides an improved debugging and profiling experience, by Shogan.ai (Frederic Bour and Thomas Refis)