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The spring-cleaning continues! When I originally prototyped Relocatable OCaml, it was during the OCaml 4.13 development cycle. The focus for the work originally was always about multiple versions of the compiler co-existing without interfering with each other, so even the early prototypes were done on both OCaml 4.12 and OCaml 4.13. In fact, I see that in this talk, I even demo’d it on both versions. My intention from the start had always been to be able to provide either backports or re-releases of older compilers, on the basis that it would be tedious to have only the latest releases of OCaml supporting the various fixes, given that the failing CI systems which had motivated the project would continue to test older versions for several/many years after completion. In 2021, OCaml 4.08 (from June 2019) was still a recent memory. From a technical perspective, OCaml 4.08 was a very important release. It’s the first version of OCaml with a reliably namespaced Standard Library (the Stdlib module, though introduced in 4.07, had various issues with shadowing modules which weren’t completely addressed until 4.08). For my work, it was the version where we switched the configuration system to autoconf, and thus introduced a configuration system for the Windows ports. It provided a natural baseline in 2022 for the backports, and thus the workshop demonstration I gave in Ljubljana featured Windows and Linux for OCaml 4.08-4.14 as well as preview of OCaml 5.0.

Synthesizing three RFC-compliant libraries (punycode, public-suffix, and cookeio) directly from Internet RFC specifications, establishing a workflow for automating standards implementation with proper cross-referencing to spec sections.

In testing various visual components, terminal resizing, keyboard handling and the use of hooks, I inadvertently wrote the less tool in Mosaic. Below are my notes on using the framework.

Every programming language comes with some “batteries” included - mostly in the form of its standard library. That’s typically all of the functionality that’s available out-of-the-box, without the need to install additional libraries. (although the definition varies from language to language) Usually standard libraries are pretty similar, but I think that OCaml’s a bit “weird” and slightly surprising in some regards, so I decided to write down a few thoughts on it and how to make the best of it.

A look back on OCaml since 2011 As you already know if you’ve read our last blogpost, we have updated our OCaml cheat sheets starting with the language and stdlib ones. We know some of you have students to initiate in September and we wanted these sheets to be ready for the start of the school yea...

In my previous post I wrote about Flambda, which is the singlebiggest feature coming to OCaml in this release. In this post, I’ll review theother features of...