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

Alan Schmitt
2022-08-02T09:51:46Z

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Hello

Here is the latest OCaml Weekly News, for the week of July 26 to August
02, 2022.

Table of Contents
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OCaml Software Foundation: summer 2022 update
Old CWN

OCaml Software Foundation: summer 2022 update
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Archive:
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-software-foundation-summer-2022-update/10234/1>

gasche announced
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A quick update on recent works of the [OCaml Software Foundation]. It
is a non-profit foundation ([earlier thread]) that receives funding
from [our industrial sponsors] each year, and tries its best to spend
it to support and strengthen the OCaml ecosystem and community.

The funding volume we receive each year is around 200K€. (For
comparison: this is the yearly cost of one experienced full-time
software engineer in many parts of the world.) We do not fund people
full-time for long periods. Most actions receive from 3K€ to 20K€.
The work to prepare and execute actions is mostly done by the (unpaid)
[Executivee Committee]. It is currently formed by Nicolás Ojeda Bär
('nojb'), Damien Doligez, Xavier Leroy, Kim Nguyễn and myself, with
administrative personel provided by [INRIA].

Our current sponsors (thanks!) are [ahrefs], [Jane Street], [Tezos],
[Bloomberg], [Lexifi], [SimCorp], [MERCE] and [Tarides]. (If your
company would like to join as a sponsor, please [get in touch].
Unfortunately, we still cannot efficiently process small donations, so
we are not calling for individual donations.)

Feel free to use this thread for discussions, questions, suggestions
and criticism, or to send a message/email for feedback.

[OCaml Software Foundation] <http://ocaml-sf.org/>

[earlier thread]
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-the-ocaml-software-foundation/4476>

[our industrial sponsors] <http://ocaml-sf.org/#sponsors>

[Executivee Committee] <http://ocaml-sf.org/about-us/>

[INRIA]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_in_Computer_Science_and_Automation>

[ahrefs] <https://ahrefs.com/>

[Jane Street] <https://janestreet.com/>

[Tezos] <https://tezos.com/>

[Bloomberg] <https://bloomberg.com/>

[Lexifi] <https://lexifi.com/>

[SimCorp] <https://simcorp.com/>

[MERCE] <https://www.mitsubishielectric-rce.eu/>

[Tarides] <https://tarides.com/>

[get in touch] <http://ocaml-sf.org/becoming-a-sponsor/>

Recent actions
╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌

Below are some of the actions that we funded in the last year or so,
and which have been actively worked on already by the people receiving
the funding.

Tooling
┄┄┄┄┄┄┄

We worked on improving the debugging experience for OCaml by funding
Fabian ('copy') to work on OCaml symbol demangling in Linux `perf'
([thread]), and supporting Yuxiang Wen ('hackwaly')'s work on
[ocamlearlybird] ([thread]), an OCaml bytecode debugger for vscode.

We also funded the early development work of [mutaml], a
mutation-testing prototype by Jan Midtgaard.

[thread]
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-perf-demangling-of-ocaml-symbols-a-short-introduction-to-perf/7143/>

[ocamlearlybird] <https://github.com/hackwaly/ocamlearlybird>

[thread]
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-ocamlearlybird-1-0-0-beta1/7180>

[mutaml] <https://github.com/jmid/mutaml>

Communication
┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄

We decided to fund the time that Alan Schmitt ('brab') spends on the
[Caml Weekly News] – Alan also started cross-posting them on [reddit]
on this occasion.

We funded John Whitington to work on OCaml documentation, on the core
manual (see in particular [this PR]) or newcomer-oriented content on
ocaml.org ([Get Up and Running with OCaml] and [A First Hour With
OCaml]). We also purchased rights to John Whitington's book [OCaml
from the Very Beginning] to put it [online] ([thread]). This is a good
introduction to OCaml for people with little to no programming
experience, and we hope that it will be easier to onboard people if
they can get a free version online – of course they are encouraged to
buy a paper copy if they like it and can afford it.

We supported editing work for an upcoming book from the [Owl] team,
"Architecture of Numerical Systems", with the requirement that the
book be Open Access. (The idea followed our attempt to fund a hacking
retreat for the Owl project in 2019, that was cancelled due to COVID.)

We are also funding some work to refresh an older book about Caml in
French, [Le Langage Caml], also available online, which several people
in the community cite as their favorite OCaml book. Currently we are
funding Armaël Guéneau to refresh the book's (crufty build system and)
content to work with current OCaml versions – the book was written in
1993 for Caml Light – and we are considering funding an English
translation.

[Caml Weekly News] <https://alan.petitepomme.net/cwn/>

[reddit] <https://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/>

[this PR] <https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/10247>

[Get Up and Running with OCaml] <https://ocaml.org/docs/up-and-running>

[A First Hour With OCaml] <https://ocaml.org/docs/first-hour>

[OCaml from the Very Beginning] <http://ocaml-book.com/>

[online]
<https://johnwhitington.net/ocamlfromtheverybeginning/index.html>

[thread]
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-from-the-very-beginning-now-free-in-pdf-and-html-formats/9361>

[Owl] <https://ocaml.xyz/>

[Le Langage Caml] <https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/books/llc.pdf>

Teaching
┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄

We funded Louis Gesbert ('AltGr') to do some technical development
work on the LearnOCaml codebase. LearnOCaml is a technical platform to
deploy automatically-graded OCaml exercices, used in various
universities with probably around a few thousands students each year.

We are also funding a Summer School about OCaml at the university of
Zaragoza in Spain in early September 2022 ([thread], [website]).

Note: if you are organizing an OCaml event (workshop, meetup, etc.),
please get in touch to see whether/how we could support you.

[thread]
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-summer-school-in-spain-call-for-industry-speakers/9685>

[website] <https://webdiis.unizar.es/evpf/>

Ecosystem
┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄

We are funding part of the time Kate ('kit-ty-kate') spends on
release-readiness for the OCaml compiler distribution – monitoring
build results for the whole OPAM repository and working with compiler
maintainers and downstream package authors to solve compatibility
issues before the release. This is great work which we think had a
strong impact. There is now a larger concerted effort (not funded by
us) to coordinate core tools around compiler releases – see [this
opam-repository PR] for example, which puts the ecosystem in a fairly
good place compared to how new compiler versions felt a few years ago.

We are also supporting Marcello Seri ('mseri') for his contributions
to opam-repository maintenance.

We are supporting Jonah Beckford ('jbeckford')'s work on his [Diskuv
OCaml] distribution for Windows.

[this opam-repository PR]
<https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/issues/17530>

[Diskuv OCaml] <https://diskuv.gitlab.io/diskuv-ocaml/>

Libraries
┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄

We are funding Petter Urkedal ('paurkedal') to work on [Caqti], an
OCaml library to work with SQL databases.

We are supporting Zach Shipko's maintenance work on the [ocaml-rs]
library, a library to write bindings / FFI code between OCaml and
Rust.

Finally, we supported some development work by Anton Bachin and Andrey
Popp around the Dream web framework. They concentrated their efforts
on [hyper] and [dream-social-login].

[Caqti] <https://github.com/paurkedal/ocaml-caqti/>

[ocaml-rs] <https://github.com/zshipko/ocaml-rs>

[hyper] <https://github.com/aantron/hyper>

[dream-social-login] <https://github.com/camlworks/dream-social-login>

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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