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As I was very happy to announce on Discuss on 12 December, OCaml is Relocatable! Today, the final piece of the puzzle was merged, which is the necessary support to allow opam to take advantage of all this to be able to clone switches instead of recompiling them. Before this, you could rename a local switch, for example, but opam would still be compiling them from scratch. The fruits of this continue to be available through my opam-repository fork, as announced in September, and will be available out-of-the-box for the first alpha release of OCaml 5.5 early next year.

If you give vapourware long enough, it condenses into an actual ware! An idea hatched between rehearsing Handel arias in the outskirts of Munich just over six years ago to make running OCaml’s programs a little less surprising is now 132 commits of reality.

I’ve been doing battle the last few days with Docker, and in particular trying to persuade BuildKit to do what I wanted. I find Docker leans towards being a deployment tool, rather than a development tool which is to say that it’s exceedingly useful for both, but when I encounter problems trying to persuade it to do what I’m after for development, it tends to feel I’m not using it for the purpose for which it was intended.

This week was a grant application, build systems, and code review - which it turns out is somewhere in the Amazon.