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Someone was kind enough a few weeks ago to comment on Hacker News that “Opam on Windows is a masterpiece of engineering”. There’s certainly a lot which has to go on under the hood to create what I believe is the necessary baseline experience. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out.

I spent last week at ICFP 2025. A nice (if exhausting!) week, as ever. Amusingly, the most reflections were actually sparked by Yaron’s talk which was right at the end (you can see the talk itself on YouTube).

Over the summer, Lucas Ma has been investigating ideas surrounding using effects in the OCaml compiler itself. He’s blogged some of his discoveries and adventures. The technical core of this work leads towards being able to use the OCaml compiler as a library on-demand to create a longer-lived “compiler service”. Of itself, that’s not at all revolutionary, but it is quite hard to do that with a 30 year old codebase that really was designed for single-shot separate compilation.

Since presenting Relocatable OCaml at OCaml Dev Meeting, I have been playing whac-a-mole with our CI systems, working towards getting finalised branches for the work ready for upstreaming. Eventually, it got to me, and I realised it was possibly time to come up with a better test environment for these changes.

OCaml Core Dev meeting at Inria yesterday. These are roughly biannual synchronous catchups which provide a chance to find out what others are up to, get feedback on any major ongoing work, and attempt to unblock some stalled PRs. Sometimes tempers get frayed, but not this time round…