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It’s been a couple of months since the last neocaml release, and the reason is simple — for a while there I was genuinely out of ideas. Back when I shipped 0.6 I declared (again!) that I was done with new features, and this time I almost meant it. But ideas have a way of creeping back in, and 0.9 turned out to be a meaty release. Here are the highlights.

When I released neocaml 0.1 last month, I thought I was more or less done with the (main) features for the foreseeable future. The original scope was deliberately small — a couple of Tree-sitter-powered OCaml major modes (for .ml and .mli), a REPL integration, and not much else. I was quite happy with how things turned out and figured the next steps would be mostly polish and bug fixes.

Over the past year I’ve been spending a lot of time building Tree-sitter-powered major modes for Emacs – clojure-ts-mode (as co-maintainer), neocaml (from scratch), and asciidoc-mode (also from scratch). Between the three projects I’ve accumulated enough knowledge (and battle scars) to write about the experience. This post distills the key lessons for anyone thinking about writing a Tree-sitter-based major mode, or curious about what it’s actually like.

Over the past year I’ve been spending a lot of time building TreeSitter-powered major modes for Emacs – clojure-ts-mode (as co-maintainer), neocaml (from scratch), and asciidoc-mode (also from scratch). Between the three projects I’ve accumulated enough battle scars to write about the experience. This post distills the key lessons for anyone thinking about writing a TreeSitter-based major mode, or curious about what it’s actually like.

A few years ago I wrote about setting up Emacs for OCaml development. Back then the recommended stack was tuareg-mode + merlin-mode, with Merlin providing the bulk of the IDE experience. A lot has changed since then – the OCaml tooling has evolved considerably, and I’ve been working on some new tools myself. Time for an update.

neocaml 0.1 is finally out! Almost a year after I announced the project, I’m happy to report that it has matured to the point where I feel comfortable calling it ready for action. Even better - neocaml recently landed in MELPA, which means installing it is now as easy as:

I wasn’t an early adopter of TreeSitter in Emacs, as usually such big transitions are not smooth and the initial support for TreeSitter in Emacs left much to be desired. Recently, however, Emacs 30 was released with many improvements on that front, and I felt the time was right for me to (try to) embrace TreeSitter.