The OCaml Planet RSS

Would you like to build every package in opam in a single Dockerfile using BuildKit?

Over the last few months, I have written several posts on the package installation graphs specifically, Topological Sort of Packages, Installation order for opam packages and Transitive Reduction of Package Graph. In this post, I’d like to cover a alternative ordering solution.

One of the first things developers want to do in any language is print out the value of a variable. In languages with dynamic typing or extensive reflection, this is often a trivial, built-in operation. In OCaml, the story is a bit different. Its strong, static type system requires you to be explicit about how to turn a data structure into a string representation. There is no universal print or console.log that works on any type.

When I started to play with OCaml I was kind of surprised that there was no id (identity) function that was available out-of-box (in Stdlib module, that’s auto-opened). A quick search lead me to the Fun module, which is part of the standard library and is nested under Stdlib. It was introduced in OCaml 4.08, alongside other modules such as Int, Result and Option.1 It was part of some broader efforts to slim down Stdlib and move in the direction of a more modular standard library. ↩

Today I’m going to cover a very basic topic - conversions between OCaml’s primary numeric types int and float. I guess most of you are wondering if such a basic topic deserves a special treatment, but if you read on I promise that it will be worth it.

Jon asked me to make a Docker image that contains OxCaml ready to run without the need to build it from scratch.

I am grateful for Tarides’ sponsorship of my OCaml work. Below is a summary of my activities in Q2 2025.