OCaml Weekly News

v0.17 release of Jane Street packages

Dear OCaml developers,

We are pleased to announce the v0.17 release of Jane Street packages!

This release comes with 15 new packages and a multitude of new features and fixes.

Ahrefs has released jsonschema2atd, a cli tool to convert an OpenAPI or Json Schema specification into an atd file.

Quite a lot of api out there are now publishing some kind of spec for their expected input our output. It's often done through a a JSON Schema or OpenAPI document. The goal of this tool is to save time for large api by doing a mechanical translation to an atd file instead of writing all the types by hand.

Unfortunately the world is kind of a mess. Most of the specs we have seen are not following a specific version of openapi/jsonschema but contain a bit of everything. jsonschema2atd does its best to do the right thing, but there are probably cases that aren't covered.

The generated code might also not be optimal. It often deserves some hand cleanup and a bit of renaming. Hopefully it still gives a good head start.

Thanks to Egor Chemokhonenko for this work.

The code is available at https://github.com/ahrefs/jsonschema2atd

And there is a package that is published on opam https://ocaml.org/p/jsonschema2atd/latest

Dear everyone,

the opam-repository policy just changed to not accept md5-only checksums, and also to avoid extra-files in packages (use extra-source instead).

I am pleased to announce the alpha release of Camlkit. Camlkit provides OCaml bindings to a collection of Cocoa frameworks on macOS, iOS, and GNUstep. Currently available are Foundation, AppKit, UIKit, WebKit, CoreImage, Photos, and Vision.

The package camlkit for macOS/GNUstep development is available from OPAM. The key libraries to add to your dune file are camlkit-base.foundation and camlkit-gui.appkit.

iOS development requires a cross-toolchain. The package is named camlkit-ios. UIKit is in the library camlkit-gui.uikit.

Other useful resources:

• a starter project template for iOS
• a few example porgrams

More information is available on the project's github page. Feedback and contributions are welcome. I hope we can make OCaml viable for GUI development and on mobile. Happy hacking!

MoonBit is ML language inspired by Rust, Go and OCaml, it was announced with a Wasm backend, and recently we added a JavaScript backend, we plan to ship a native backend this year.

It is similar to OCaml, the main difference is that we have traits, zero-cost generics and modern tooling support. You are welcome to DM for more details.

I once created a command-line bookmarking tool called Favemarks in OCaml using Janestreet's Core Command.

The meeting notes are now available from the last meeting.

Thanks to everyone who attended the meeting. The next meeting is set for [date=2024-06-18 time=17:00:00 timezone="Europe/London"], if that changes we'll post to this thread. Hope to see you there!

Hello fellow Camel-wranglers,

It's my pleasure to announce the release of Yojson 2.2.0 which you can find in your neighborhood opam-repository.

The most important highlights include:

• JSON5 support. Getting annoyed by dangling commas being a problem or the inability to use comments? JSON5 is basically JSON but with the object syntax of ECMAScript 5.1 which allows some additional features like unquoted keys, dangling commas or well, comments. This has been in the works for years but finally made it to the finish-line. The new JSON5 parser requires sedlex and at least OCaml 4.08, thus it is part of the yojson-five package. Its usage mimics the Yojson package; there exist both Basic and Safe variants and the AST matches the JSON variants.
• No CPPO dependency anymore. Given the large amount of reverse-dependencies on Yojson, each dependency of Yojson is going to be a dependency of a lot of packages, thus keeping the dependency cone small makes everything (slightly) faster. As such, instead of using CPPO as a compile-time dependency we now use µCPPO as a light-weight alternative. µCPPO is meant for embedding as part of the build process and supports a tiny subset of what CPPO supports but without an extra package.

Happy de- and encoding!

I'm excited to announce the release of grace 0.2.0, an OCaml library for building, reporting and rendering beautiful compiler diagnostics :camel: :paintbrush:. Now available on opam-repository.

The three main features of this release include:

• :books: UTF8 support: Source files can now contain Unicode characters, including emojis ⚡️ 🌈 🚀, with proper rendering of ASCII art for errors.
• :1234: Error Codes: Diagnostics can now include short, searchable error codes. Allowing compilers to integrate a Rust-like error code index.
• 🤏 Compact ANSI Errors: Grace_ansi_renderer now supports a pp_compact_diagnostic for concise error messages, displaying only the file location and the error message.

Tap into the power of Grace for your error reporting! Happy hacking 👨‍💻

It is my pleasure to announce the first release of slipshow on opam.

Slipshow is a presentation tool to create presentation that are not based on slides, but on more continuous transitions, similar to scrolling.

You can find more information and examples on the project repo and on the documentation.

How is that related to the OCaml community? While the "runtime"/"engine" is still written in javascript (I did not know OCaml back then, but there is a plan to rewrite it), the compiler is written in OCaml! And I am really grateful for the many authors of open source libraries, of very high quality, that I depend on and could do nothing without them :) Thanks a lot to all OCaml library and tool authors!

$ opam update
$ opam install slipshow
# create and open ~source.md~ in your editor
$ slipshow --serve source.md

Hope it can be useful :D

Here are links from many OCaml blogs aggregated at the ocaml.org blog.

• Effective ML Through Merlin's Destruct Command