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Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of August 26 to September 02, 2008.

  1. bitstring 1.9.9 released
  2. orpc 0.1, tool for generating RPC bindings from OCaml signatures
  3. Batteries Included Release 0
  4. 3.11?

bitstring 1.9.9 released

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/232581a7813a6224#

Richard Jones announced:
We're pleased to announce the latest release of bitstring, the project
which adds Erlang-style bitstrings and matching over bitstrings as a
syntax extension and library for OCaml.

 http://code.google.com/p/bitstring/
 http://bitstring.googlecode.com/files/ocaml-bitstring-1.9.9.tar.gz

This version is a release candidate (hopefully the last one) for 2.0.
So it needs testing to make sure it builds on other platforms and to
work out any final bugs.

We've spent a lot of time recently optimizing bitmatches.  For common
cases like destructuring byte-aligned integers and strings, small
functions are inlined into the generated code and/or we use fastpath
calls written in C.  Bitmatches are as much as 6 times faster.

We've also extended the test suite so that it covers as much of the
library as possible.  Now 82% of the library is covered by 'make test'
(http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/bitstring/coverage-report/)
			

orpc 0.1, tool for generating RPC bindings from OCaml signatures

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/961fb555083e10d1#

Jake Donham announced:
We are pleased to announce the release of orpc, a tool for generating RPC
bindings from OCaml signatures. Orpc works with the ONC RPC implementation in
Ocamlnet; it is designed to be used in place of ocamlrpcgen. The advantage is
that you can use familiar OCaml syntax, most OCaml data types, exceptions, and
labeled/optional function arguments. In addition orpc can generate
tracing/pretty-printing code from a signature, and it permits asynchronous
clients and servers to be written using the Lwt threads library.

You can find orpc at

  http://code.google.com/p/orpc2/

We hope that you will find it useful.

Jake Donham, for Skydeck
			

Batteries Included Release 0

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/9808e261545b0331#

David Teller announced:
I'm happy to announce the availability of a preview release of
Batteries Included. Batteries Included is a candidate standard
development platform for OCaml.

For this release 0, Batteries only gives access to the OCaml base
library and to ExtLib. Future versions will add access to other
libraries. Our final objective is to obtain a platform containing all
the tools necessary for most common tasks, from data structures to XML
to user interfaces to network access.

More details on the blog [1]. The code may be found on OCamlForge [2]. A
GODI package is being prepared. Suggestions and discussions on this
mailing-list are heartily welcome.

Cheers,
David

[1]
http://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/ocaml-batteries-included-release-0-where-it-should-all-have-begun/ 
[2] http://forge.ocamlcore.org/frs/?group_id=17&release_id=41
			
David Teller later added:
Auto-generated documentation has just been uploaded [3]. As you may see,
the default presentation of OCamlDoc is possibly not quite what we need.
If you wish to help us develop a nice OCamlDoc plug-in to obtain
something more readable, please contact us.

Cheers,
David

[3]
http://forge.ocamlcore.org/docman/index.php?group_id=17&selected_doc_group_id=49&language_id=1
			

3.11?

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/3cb8a31b8408b6dd#

Richard Jones asked and Xavier Leroy answered:
> I asked about 3.11 and when it would be released, and the answer at
> that time was in late August:
> 
> http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/tree/browse_frm/thread/15126f960406e056/531fda06c1da700e
> 
> Obviously August (2008?) is slipping away.  Do we have any updates on
> the status of 3.11?

We made good progress during the summer, but a bit of polish and code
review is needed before the release.

> The reason I ask is that the Fedora 10 beta deadline has slipped
> because of the security intrusion two weeks ago, which means there is
> a slim possibility of getting 3.11 into Fedora 10, if the release
> happens real soon.

I'm afraid 3.11 will not be ready in time for Fedora 10.
			

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zM

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Alan Schmitt