The OCaml Planet RSS

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”.

I’ve been largely steering clear of the AI bandwagon up to now, mainly because the last thing I needed while working on Relocatable OCaml was to be trying to learn a new tool at the same time as finishing something which felt desperately late and which, at times, I myself didn’t fully understand!

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.

```diff @@ -44,6 +44,8 @@ # the lines involved in the conflict, which is arguably worse #/Changes merge=union

Earlier this year, I returned to the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, as part of the Energy and Environment Group, combining with my work at Tarides. It’s been something of a whirlwind, which doesn’t look like it’ll be abating just yet, but there’s still been the odd chance to consider where things are and where we might be headed.

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).

Rather varied week this week. A number of our EEG interns have started their work with us for the summer, with two nice projects falling under my direct supervision, with Lucas and Jeremy.

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.

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