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As a Scala developer, I will document my journey of learning OCaml and how it compares to Scala

Today, looking at my OxCaml inference engine, I wanted to see whether day10 build . could build an OxCaml project.

The base image builder has a growing number of failed builds; it’s time to address these.

Implemented a production-minded database migration system for Chaufr: CLI, tracking, checksum validation, rollback, and safe SQL execution.

I’ve taken a few days off, and while I’ve been travelling, I’ve been working on a personal project with Claude. I’ve used Claude Code for the first time, which is a much more powerful experience than using claude.ai as Claude can apply changes to the code and use your build tools directly to quickly iterate on a problem. In another first, I used js_of_ocaml, which has been awesome.

Thanks to some targetted optimisations in the script which manages Relocatable OCaml’s various branches, I’d vastly improved the turn-around time when making changes to the patch-set and propagating them through the various tests and backports. On Tuesday night, the entire set of branches was green in CI (they’re sat here with green check marks and everything). All that was to be needed on Wednesday was to quickly update the opam packaging to take advantage of Relocatable-awesomeness and plumb it all together. The 2022 version of the packages for Ljubljana I knew contained a hack for searching a previous switch, but I’d already investigated a more principled approach using opam’s build-id variable, so it would just be a matter of plumbing that in and using the cloning mechanism already in that script.

In my OCaml project, I’d like to abstract away the details of running containers into specific modules based on the OS. Currently, I have working container setups for Windows and Linux, and I’ve haphazardly peppered if Sys.win32 then where I need differentiation, but this is OCaml, so let us use functors!

While comfort-watching the indomitable Joan Hickson as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in The Body in the Library, it occurred to me that Miss Marple would have been a formidable debugger. Since returning from holiday one, two, three weeks ago, I’ve been mostly straightening out and finalising the final Relocatable OCaml PR. A frustrating task, because I know these things will take weeks and have little to show for at the end, so one spends the entire time feeling it should be finished by now. It’s just about there, when this little testsuite failure popped up: