Hello
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of May 03 to 10, 2011.
Archive: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-05/msg00036.html
Fabrice Le Fessant announced:
As OCamlPro is starting its activity, one of our main concern is to
drag new industrial companies towards OCaml in the medium term. To
better understand how to convince them that they should use OCaml, we
are conducting a short survey on the main benefits of using OCaml, from
outside of the academic world, and on the main needs/obstacles that we
should target, to make OCaml more appealing for industrial users.
If your company uses OCaml at a large scale, i.e. if you are among a
team (at least two ;-) ) of OCaml developers, we would be interested to
hear about the reasons why your company chose OCaml for developing
software, and about the problems you meet using OCaml, so that we can
work on it. Here is the link to the survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R7BB6PL
David MENTRE asked and Fabrice Le Fessant replied:
> Will you share the results of this survey?
Yes, of course, but I don't know yet at which level of details, as going
into details might require to anonymize the responses.
rixed asked and Fabrice Le Fessant replied:
> What about a survey about why our companies chose _not_ to use OCaml ?
> Wouldn't be useful as well ?
Actually, it is part of the survey, but the question is about the
"needs" of those who chose it, but it can also be seen as the reasons
why your company chose not to use it, because those needs were not filled.
Anyway, of course, if anybody is part of a company where a discussion
happened about using or not OCaml, feel free to reply to the survey, as
the questions are "opened", so that you can add comments wherever you want.
Archive: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-05/msg00046.html
Eijiro Sumii announced:
We have published the following announcement at:
http://www.icfpcontest.org/
Please enjoy,
Eijiro Sumii (2011 Contest Chair)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ICFP Programming Contest 2011
http://www.icfpcontest.org/
The ICFP Programming Contest 2011 is the 14th instance of the annual
programming contest series sponsored by The ACM SIGPLAN International
Conference on Functional Programming. This year, the contest starts
at 00:00 June 17 Friday UTC (= 24:00 June 16 Thursday UTC) and ends at
00:00 June 20 Monday UTC (= 24:00 June 19 Sunday UTC). Unlike in
previous years, there is no 24-hour lightning division.
The task description will be published in this blog when the contest
starts. Solutions to the task must be submitted online before the
contest ends. Details of the submission procedure will be announced
along with the contest task.
This is an open contest. Anybody may participate except for the
contest organizers and members of the same laboratory as the the
contest chair's. No advance registration or entry fee is required.
Participants may form teams. A team consists of every person who
contributes ideas and/or code towards a submission. Teams may have
any number of members. Individuals may only be members of a single
team and teams may not divide or collaborate with each other once the
contest has begun.
Any programming language(s) may be used as long as the submitted
program can be run by the judges on a standard Linux environment with
no network connection. Details of the judges' environment will be
announced later.
There will be prizes for the first (US$1,000) and second ($500) place
teams as well as a discretionary judges' prize ($500). There will
also be a total of $6,000 travel support. (The prizes and travel
support are subject to the budget plan of ICFP 2011 pending approval
by ACM.)
In addition, the organizers will declare during the conference that:
- the first place team's language is "the programming language of
choice for discriminating hackers",
- the second place team's language is "a fine tool for many
applications",
- and the team winning the judges' prize is "an extremely cool bunch
of hackers".
Additional announcements about the contest will be made at
http://www.icfpcontest.org/. Questions can be posted as comments to
the blog or e-mailed to icfpc2011-blogger AT kb.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp
(please replace AT with @).
We look forward to your participation!
The contest organizers: Hidehiko Abe, Yumi Arai, Kenichi Asai
(observer), Noriko Hirota, Atsushi Igarashi (observer), Lintaro Ina,
Kazuhiro Inaba, Arisa Iwai, Chihiro Kaneko, Shinya Kawanaka, Moe
Masuko, Yasuhiko Minamide (observer), Ryosuke Sato, Yu Shibata, Yu
Sugawara, Takeshi Tsukada, Kanae Tsushima, Yayoi Ueda, and Eijiro
Sumii (chair).
Archive: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-05/msg00054.html
Gregory Bellier announced:
I'm pleased to announce the very first release of Fdinfo 0.1.
The library's objective is to return the offset and flag of files opened by another processus. I asked a few weeks ago if such a library existed but got no answer, therefore I've started writing my own.
It's very easy to use.
The infos are extracted from /proc/<pid>/fdinfo/<fd>.
Feel free to comment or participate. The code is accessible here: https://github.com/gbe/FDinfo
Archive: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-05/msg00065.html
Wouter Swierstra announced:
Given the fairly recent severe earthquake and tsunami in Japan, you
may wonder how this affects the preparations for ICFP'11 in Tokyo.
Luckily, Tokyo was significantly less affected by these saddening
events than the regions further north. In fact, the situation in
Tokyo is almost back to normal, after only two months, with another
four months until ICFP. Moreover, all major embassies have in the
meantime lifted their travel advisories for the Tokyo metropolitan
region (while they still maintain active advisories for some other
regions.)
Our local organisational team has completed major parts of the
preparations and recently summarised the most important facts on a
local information page for ICFP'11:
http://www.biglab.org/icfp11local/index.html
The main conference site is at
http://www.icfpconference.org/icfp2011/
We are looking forward to seeing you in Tokyo in September!
Manuel Chakravarty
Zhenjiang Hu
(General Chairs of ICFP'11)
Thanks to Alp Mestan, we now include in the Caml Weekly News the links to the
recent posts from the ocamlcore planet blog at http://planet.ocamlcore.org/.
Gammu 0.9 released:
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=792
A Monad for OCaml Duppy:
http://blog.rastageeks.org/ocaml/article/a-monad-for-ocaml-duppy
A Fork-Join framework on a budget:
http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2011/05/fork-join-framework-on-budget.html
Camlcity.org gets a shared cache:
http://blog.camlcity.org/blog/multicore4.html
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