[Caml-list] Attn: Development Editor, Latest OCaml Weekly News

Alan Schmitt
2021-11-02T08:50:38Z

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Hello

Here is the latest OCaml Weekly News, for the week of October 26 to
November 02, 2021.

Table of Contents
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Lists.ocaml.org: service temporarily sunsetted
Talk at Func Prog Sweden
First OPAM releases of Scad_ml and [@@deriving scad]
Other OCaml News
Old CWN

Lists.ocaml.org: service temporarily sunsetted
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Archive:
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/lists-ocaml-org-service-temporarily-sunsetted/8692/1>

Anil Madhavapeddy announced
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*This note does not concern the main OCaml email list, which continues
to be available through <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/>*

The lists.ocaml.org e-mail service has been going through a rough time
in the past few years, with vast swathes of spam regularly hitting our
ingress email server and require manual unblocking every time. It was
set up [back in 2012] as an augmentation of the main OCaml mailing
list and really helped with some big projects in the early days (the
design of and migration to ppx from camlp4, for example). However, in
the intervening years e-mail has reduced in importance as a primary
community communication mechanism (as evidenced, for example, in this
forum).

With the latest spam surge, I've moved the service into read-only mode
with all the mailboxes and archives still available on the website,
but with mail delivery and list creation/admin disabled. All existing
links should continue to work to historical links online without
change. The only mailing list on there that was still active to my
knowledge is the opam-commits cron list, which will be replaced by an
ocurrent-based deployer for that website shortly.

I hope to bring e-mail back to ocaml.org sometime in 2022, as it's an
important communications medium that is highly accessible. One
challenge is spam, and another is the inflexibility of GNU Mailman and
its upgrade mechanism (essentially a manual process from 2 to
3). Therefore, if there is anyone in the community interested in
building a simple e-mail list manager in OCaml, that would be of
interest :slight_smile:

[back in 2012]
<https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-12/msg00015.html>

Talk at Func Prog Sweden
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Archive: <https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/talk-at-func-prog-sweden/8703/1>

Leonardo Laguna Ruiz announced
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Here's a link for the talk I gave at the Func Prog Sweden meetup. In
that talk I show the process we follow some years ago in order to move
all our code base to OCaml and why it was an excellent decision.

<https://youtu.be/FGXiAARXE2M>

[Wolfram System Modeler] is a simulation environment that can be used
to model multi-domain systems. For example systems composed of
electrical, thermal, hydraulic, mechanical, etc, components.

One of the main parts of System Modeler is the model compiler (Kernel)
which takes models written in the Modelica language and compiles them
into efficient simulation executables. This compiler was ported to
OCaml by using custom tool that performed the code to code translation
of our old code base.

Slides
<https://a2076202-c90b-450e-901b-cb56c346913c.usrfiles.com/ugd/a20762_adfa899586c7413a8c17f7b708dbc177.pdf>

[Wolfram System Modeler] <https://www.wolfram.com/system-modeler/>

First OPAM releases of Scad_ml and [@@deriving scad]
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Archive:
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-first-opam-releases-of-scad-ml-and-deriving-scad/8718/1>

geoffder announced
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I'd like to announce the first release onto opam of [Scad_ml] and
[ppx_deriving_scad]. The former being a DSL front-end to the
[OpenSCAD] solid modelling language, and the latter providing
transformation function generation for custom types (a pattern that I
have found useful during my time using `Scad_ml'.

When I decided I wanted to pick up OpenScad, I was pleasantly
surprised to discover that the `Scad_ml' library already existed on
GitHub, credits to <https://github.com/namachan10777>. Over time I
filled out the rest of the OpenSCAD language coverage, as well as some
additional helpful math, and reorganized things to try and keep it
from getting too messy as more and more was tacked on. Finally, after
some help in the ocaml discord (from NULL and octachron), we also now
can track whether shapes are 2D or 3D with minimal changes to the user
interface, preventing misapplications of operations that would
otherwise only appear in the OpenSCAD console.

The `[@@deriving scad]' ppx is my solution to make a habit I developed
to get around the otherwise fully declarative nature of working in
OpenSCAD more ergonomic. Shapes in OpenSCAD cannot be queried in any
way, so upon creation, the locations of it's vertices or it's origin
are not available. Of course, since you created it, you know exactly
it's dimensions, and where you have moved it, but what if you want to
use the location of one of it's vertices, wherever that ends up after
a series of transformations? What I did for some time before learning
how to write a ppx, was put the coordinates I cared about into a
record with the shape, and mapped over the type (by hand (and regex))
with the relevant functions (typically transform and rotate). Turns
out writing a ppx with `Ppxlib' and `metaquot' isn't so bad, and I
really wish I did it sooner!

Anyway, to the few of you out there that might use OpenSCAD, I hope
that these tools might come in handy!

[Scad_ml] <https://github.com/namachan10777/scad-ml>

[ppx_deriving_scad] <https://github.com/geoffder/ppx_deriving_scad>

[OpenSCAD] <https://openscad.org/>

Other OCaml News
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>From the ocamlcore planet blog
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Here are links from many OCaml blogs aggregated at [OCaml Planet].

• [Hiring a Developer Educator]
• [Verification for Dummies: SMT and Induction]
• [SCoP Passed Phase 1 of the DAPSI Initiative!]

[OCaml Planet] <http://ocaml.org/community/planet/>

[Hiring a Developer Educator]
<https://blog.janestreet.com/hiring-a-developer-educator/>

[Verification for Dummies: SMT and Induction]
<https://www.ocamlpro.com/2021/10/14/verification-for-dummies-smt-and-induction/>

[SCoP Passed Phase 1 of the DAPSI Initiative!]
<https://tarides.com/blog/2021-10-14-scop-selected-for-dapsi-phase2>

Old CWN
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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
[online].

[Alan Schmitt]

[send me a message] <mailto:alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org>

[the archive] <https://alan.petitepomme.net/cwn/>

[RSS feed of the archives] <https://alan.petitepomme.net/cwn/cwn.rss>

[online] <http://lists.idyll.org/listinfo/caml-news-weekly/>

[Alan Schmitt] <https://alan.petitepomme.net/>

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