OCaml Weekly News

I've just released opam-grep.0.2.0 with quite a bit of change compared to the previous version. Here is the highlight:

• Complete rewrite from shell script to OCaml, making it more portable
• Use the faster ripgrep and ugrep over grep when available (suggestion by @Engil)
• Use the progress library to show progress instead of a non-portable/DIY spinner

See the changelog for the full list of relevant changes.

Big thanks to @CraigFe for the progress library (such a treat!) and to @dbuenzli for bos and cmdliner in particular, making it easy to do such rewrite :relaxed:

Hi everyone! We are excited to announce that we have completed this project and blog. Progress has been slow these past few months due to work, internships, and college, but we’ve now released v1.0.0 on GitHub. We also published posts on:

• Design patterns, conventions, and testing
• How the Always DSL can be used to write safe “pseudo-imperative” code in Hardcaml
• Hardcaml’s testing and interactive simulation tools
• A recap of some interesting hardware/CPU features in our design

Finally, we published a conclusion blog post, which wraps up some strengths/weaknesses of Hardcaml, as well as some takeaways on OCaml and blogging more generally.

Thank you to @andyman and @fyquah95 for building Hardcaml, and for helping us out on GitHub issues! We really appreciate your time and suggestions.

Overall, we’ve come to the conclusion that Hardcaml is a much better tool for hardware design than Verilog. This has been a great experience, and we walk away with a better understanding of hardware, functional programming, and technical writing.

Not exactly what you are asking for, but @Octachron wrote an excellent chapter on GADTs in the OCaml manual, which could be recommended to people starting GADT programming. It explains why recursive functions on GADT need "explicit polymorphic annotations" in less "implementation driven" terms.

(The chapter also demonstrates the new naming scheme for existential type variables introduced by GADT constructors, which can help a lot working through type errors, but are still a bit heavy and deserve a gentle introduction.)

I have only written the nomenclature part and a bit of the explanation for recursive functions in this chapter, @garrigue is the author of most of this chapter.

There is now an implementation using multicore-OCaml in the 'domains' branch.

https://github.com/UnixJunkie/parany/tree/domains

People are very welcome to give it a try and share the speedup they observe, especially compared to fork-based parallelism.

Thanks to @nilsbecker for having motivated me.

If you don't use the domains branch, then parany is using fork-based parallelism. If you want to use the domains branch, you need to install multicore-ocaml first:

opam switch create 4.12.0+domains
eval `opam config env`

The release of OCaml 4.13.0 is expected for next week.

Since we had a native code generation bug fix and two minor configuration tweaks since the first release candidate, we are publishing a second release candidate. If you find any bugs, please report them here:

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues

Happy hacking, Florian Angeletti for the OCaml team.

Unicode 14.0.0 was released on the 14th of september.

It adds 838 new characters to the standard including, for our friends from Central Asia, support for Old Uyghur. For information about all the other additions, see the announcement page.

Accordingly the libraries mentioned at the end of this message had to be updated, consult the individual release notes for details. Both Uucd and Uucp are incompatible releases sinces new script and block enumerants had to be added.

Best,

Daniel

P.S. Though I'm not very fond of the concept, I recently enabled sponsors on my github account as an experiment. So I'd like to thanks my github sponsors, @davesnx became the first one monday.

Hey all, I've just submitted an Outreachy project for the winter round. The project is to write the basic ppx_deriving plugins in ppxlib; that is, the ones that don't already have a version based on ppxlib. I think both, having them available to use, and having their code available as simple examples of how to use Ppxlib.Deriving would be very nice! And improving ppxlib's documentation and finding simple issues on already existing PPXs to prepare for Outreachy, will be beneficial as well.

Of course, it's not clear if someone with the right interest comes along for this project, but if we don't find an intern for it this round, I can just re-submit the same project next round.

Btw, the deadline to submit projects was extended and is now Sept 23rd. So the timeline in our post above is slightly outdated.

The OCaml 4.13 preview for ocaml-lsp-server is now available as well.

To install it along with the OCaml 4.13 rc, please refer to the first post.

If you encounter any problems while using ocaml-lsp-server, please feel free to report it directly in https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp/pull/506