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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.

Most programming languages I’ve used have some form of string interpolation. Ruby has "Hello, #{name}!", Python has f-strings, JavaScript has template literals, even Haskell has a few popular interpolation libraries. It’s one of those small conveniences you don’t think about until it’s gone.

When I started learning OCaml I kept running into code like this:

If there’s one thing that frustrated me early on in my OCaml journey, it was printing stuff. In Ruby I can p anything and get a useful representation. In Clojure, prn just works on every data structure. In OCaml? There’s no generic print that works on any type – the type information is erased at runtime, so the language simply doesn’t know how to stringify an arbitrary value.

Records are one of those things that look almost identical across ML-family languages, so I didn’t expect many surprises when I started using them in OCaml. For the most part I was right – but there were a few things worth noting, especially if you’re coming from a language where records/structs are mutable by default.

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.

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.

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: