OCaml Weekly News

I've added a third post: https://diskuv.com/mlfront/overview-3/

In it I describe a small but useful reference build system for MlFront which can take packages like:

.
├── AcmeWidgets_Std/
│   └── A.ml
└── BobBuilder_Std/
    └── B.ml

and produce standalone build scripts that can be committed to source control:

$ mlfront-boot -native -o buildscript

$ ./buildscript.sh # .\buildscript.cmd is also created

$ target/BobBuilder_Std.B
I am an A!
I am a B!

On a related note, I've begun to implement a small part of https://gallium.inria.fr/~scherer/namespaces/spec.pdf. It is not strictly required but Namespaces.mli will be very helpful for upgrading existing projects to MlFront-style packages without changing code. That will be for a future (not soon) post.

It is my pleasure to announce the first release of hector, an OCaml library that offers vectors (also known as dynamic arrays, or resizeable arrays).

To install it, type opam update && opam install hector.

hector offers polymorphic vectors, where the type of the elements is a parameter, monomorphic vectors, where the type of the elements is fixed, and integer vectors, a special case of monomorphic vectors.

hector's vectors are not thread-safe and do not include a protection against memory leaks. Compared with the Dynarray module in OCaml's standard library, hector's polymorphic and monomorphic vectors are slightly faster, and hector's integer vectors are significantly faster. hector offers fast (but dangerous) unsafe access operations, namely unsafe_get, unsafe_set, and unsafe_borrow. For a more detailed overview, see the documentation.

Thanks for everyone who joined today! The meeting minutes are online and the next meeting will be in two weeks, 21st of August at 10:00 (AM) CEST.

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

• The Guide to Software Verification with Frama-C is available