OCaml Outreachy Internships

This is a record of all past OCaml Community Outreachy Internship Projects.

Winter 2022

Implement a non-blocking, streaming codec for TopoJSON

Mentee: Prisca Chidimma Maduka
Mentor(s): Patrick Ferris, Odinaka Joy

TopoJSON is an extension to GeoJSON to encode topology. This allows for redundant data to be removed and file sizes to be greatly reduced. This is often very desirable especially when working with data in the browser. In a previous Outreachy internship a new OCaml library was implemented to provide an OCaml library for TopoJSON, this project will build on this adding more functionality to the library and providing a non-blocking, streaming codec version similar to the geojsone library.

Summer 2022

Expand OCaml 5.0 Parallel Benchmark suite

Mentee: Moazzam Moriani
Mentor(s): Sudha Parimala

OCaml 5.0 will be live soon! It ships with support for shared-memory parallelism and concurrency OCaml has missed all these years. This will be accompanied by a robust set of Multicore libraries useful for parallel programming. The Multicore compiler and libraries are under active development and will continue to evolve as the OCaml ecosystem moves towards Multicore. For assessing the impact of new features in the OCaml compiler and Multicore libraries, we have a set of sequential and parallel benchmarks present in our benchmark suite. While the sequential benchmarks contain many real-world applications, a wider set of parallel benchmarks would be useful. This project entails gathering the parallel benchmarks available at various places like https://github.com/ckoparkar/ocaml-benchmarks and making them available in the benchmark suite.

Extend OCaml's GeoJSON library to support TopoJSON

Mentee: Jay Dev Jha
Mentor(s): Patrick Ferris

TopoJSON is an extension to GeoJSON to encode topology. This allows for redundant data to be removed and file sizes to be greatly reduced. This is often very desirable especially when working with data in the browser. This project looks to extend ocaml-geojson to support TopoJSON.

Winter 2021

Build a monitoring dashboard for OCaml.org

Mentee: Jiae Kam
Mentor(s): Thibaut Mattio, Patrik Keller

We currently have no visibility on the performance of the server serving v3.ocaml.org, which pages are most visited, if errors happen, etc. To offer some visibility, we can implement a basic monitoring dashboard that would provide Metrics such as: Memory, CPU, Open file descriptors, Statistics such as (check if GDPR compliant first!) Requested URIs, User agents, Language, Logs. This project consists of mostly two parts: a frontend, and a backend. The backend consists of building a high-level library to collect data and get statistics on them. The frontend will use this library to display graphs of the metrics, statistics, and other data we want to collect.

Improve the OCaml meta-programming ecosystem

Mentee: Aya Sharaf
Mentor(s): Shon Feder, Sonja Heinze, Patrik Keller

It's common for programming languages to provide some way to meta-program in order to preprocess code before reaching the last compilation step, for example, in the form of macros or templates. The OCaml compiler doesn't provide a full built-in macro system, but the OCaml parser does provide syntax for preprocessing purposes: attributes (https://v3.ocaml.org/docs/metaprogramming#attributes-and-derivers) and extension points (https://v3.ocaml.org/docs/metaprogramming#extension-nodes-and-extenders). We -the OCaml community- also have an official framework, called `ppxlib`, to write preprocessors -called PPXs- based on that syntax and integrate them into the compilation process. However, it's on the OCaml community to write and provide important PPXs to the OCaml developers. We've noticed that having the most important PPXs under the official PPX github organization -next to `ppxlib`- is helpful: developers can easily find them; developers can trust them; they're well-written and hygienic, so that developers can use them as how-to guides for writing other PPXs. In this project, you'll write one or some of those official standard PPXs.

Support .eml files in OCaml's VSCode extension

Mentee: Sayo Bamigbade
Mentor(s): Thibaut Mattio, Gargi Sharma, Patrik Keller

Support `.eml` files in OCaml's VSCode extension Dream, the OCaml web framework, uses `.eml` files to embed HTML in OCaml files. At the moment, opening these files in VSCode, with the official OCaml VSCode extension, will not provide any syntax highlighting or diagnostics for the `.eml` files, because they are not supported. The goal of the project is to add support for the syntax in the extension itself as a first step, and eventually, add support for the language in the OCaml Language Server (LSP) as a second step.

Summer 2021

Create opam package search

Mentee: Odinaka Joy
Mentor(s): Sonja Heinze, Patrick Ferris

opam is the source-based package manager for OCaml code. This project comprises of writing a new web client for rendering output from the opam package database. There is a JSON endpoint on opam.ocaml.org which provides information about packages which would provide metadata about the packages. We can extend this JSON metadata to include all the opam packages (not just the top 10) and use that to power a search frontend for the website. This may include presenting the data as a GraphQL endpoint with the frontend querying that endpoint using GraphQL.

Improve the ocaml.org website

Mentee: Diksha Gupta
Mentor(s): Isabella Leandersson, Patrick Ferris, Gargi Sharma

OCaml.org is the main website for OCaml, a functional, typed, high-level programming language. This project revolves around improving the website on multiple different fronts including: layout, accessibility and content.

Improve the ocaml.org website

Mentee: Shreya kumari Gupta
Mentor(s): Isabella Leandersson, Anil Madhavapeddy, Patrick Ferris, Gargi Sharma

OCaml.org is the main website for OCaml, a functional, typed, high-level programming language. This project revolves around improving the website on multiple different fronts including: layout, accessibility and content.

Summer 2020

Reducing global mutable state in the OCaml compiler codebase

Mentee: Anukriti Kumar
Mentor(s): Guillaume Bury, Vincent Laviron

Structured output format for the OCaml compiler messages

Mentee: Muskan Garg
Mentor(s): Florian Angeletti

Usually, the output messages from the compiler are a bit more difficult to read for a machine and hence it's more time consuming to find the warnings, errors, etc. and their origin. By producing a structured output for compiler messages, other tools can more easily interoperate with them and provide tooling on top of the messages.

Summer 2019

Test the OCaml compiler with code coverage tools

Mentee: Oxana Kostikova
Mentor(s): Sébastien Hinderer, Florian Angeletti

Improving the compiler testing process using code coverage tools. The core OCaml system has a large test suite and it would be very useful to see which parts of the system are tested more actively and which are not so. Developers will be helped to see where it is needed to add new tests and in the process of improving coverage, it is possible to find unexplored bugs and fix them. It might help to make OCaml and its libraries more reliable.

Test the OCaml compiler with random tests and a reference interpreter

Mentee: Ulugbek Abdullaev
Mentor(s): Gabriel Scherer, Jan Midtgaard

The aim of this project is to extend an existing testcase-generator for the OCaml compiler, using a reference interpreter (existing or newly developed) to find a lot of bugs in the compiler, and fix as much of them as possible.

Summer 2016

MirageOS

Mentee: Gina Marie Maini
Mentor(s): Mindy Preston

Winter 2015

NTP Support for MirageOS

Mentee: Kia
Mentor(s): Hannes Mehnert

Summer 2014

MirageOS contributions and improvements

Mentee: Mindy Preston
Mentor(s): Richard Mortier, Anil Madhavapeddy

MirageOS cloud API support

Mentee: Jyotsna Prakash
Mentor(s): David Scott, Anil Madhavapeddy

MirageOS (see http://xenproject.org/developers/teams/mirage-os.html, http://www.openmirage.org/) is a type-safe unikernel written in OCaml which generates highly specialised "appliance" VMs that run directly on Xen without requiring an intervening kernel. A MirageOS application typically runs via several communicating kernel instances on the cloud. Today these instances are difficult to manage; we would like to explore strategies for managing these distributed computations using common public cloud APIs such as those exposed by Amazon EC2 and Rackspace. First we need to create pure OCaml API bindings for (e.g.) EC2 and Rackspace (purity is needed to ensure portability). These API bindings can then be used to provide operating-system-level abstractions to the unikernels. For example, a traditional VM might hotplug a vCPU; while a MirageOS application would request a "VM create" using the cloud API and "connect" the new instance to the existing network. We should be able to spin up 1000s of "CPUs" by using such APIs in a cluster environment. As well as helping Xen/Mirage, the public cloud API bindings will be very useful to other people in other contexts -- a nice side-effect.