OCaml Weekly News

A while ago, I released Tyre, a library for typesafe regular expressions that supports matching, printing, and routing. @paurkedal also released ppx_regex which provides a convenient syntax for defining regular expression matches using a PCRE syntax.

Today, we are happy to announce the release of ppx_tyre, which combines the flexibility and safety of tyre with the convenience of ppx_regexp. This also marks new releases of both tyre and ppx_regexp with improvements and bugfixes. You can find more details in the following blogpost.

https://drup.github.io/2018/08/21/ppx-tyre/

Dear OCaml hackers and enthusiasts,

we need your help! The third edition of the OCaml MOOC will start in three weeks and that's probably the perfect opportunity for your friends and all your acquaintances to discover the beauty of functional programming in OCaml. Please, take a minute to spread the word around you!

Three possible actions:

1. Convince everyone you know to register at https://tinyurl.com/ocamooc3
2. Print, post and share our flyer https://tinyurl.com/ocamooc3flyer
3. Post the announcement message which is pasted at the end of this email. It can also be found here https://gist.github.com/yurug/406b1cf63f083fd6aab76fb646aa3e39

Thank you!

Roberto Di Cosmo, Yann Régis-Gianas and Ralf Treinen.

I'm happy to announce that utop has successfully moved to ocaml-community.

We started moving utop and two of its dependencies a week ago and activity on these 3 projects has already increased., in particular with several patches to modernize them. This is an encouraging start for the ocaml-community organization!

Also moved are lambda term and zed, and there is now a CI mechanism for all three projects (and will be for all ocaml-community stuff going forward.)

It is an entire week of designing, chasing bugs, coding, with a reasonably large group of MirageOS hackers. Similar to earlier retreats, it will take place in the medina of Marrakesh. There is no schedule, but ad-hoc sessions (talks and/or workshops) are appreciated. If you're interested, find more information in reports from earlier retreats (see https://linse.me/2018/04/20/Visiting-the-camels.html and https://mirage.io/blog/2017-winter-hackathon-roundup and http://ollehost.dk/blog/2017/03/17/travel-report-mirageos-hack-retreat-in-marrakesh-2017/ and even more on http://retreat.mirage.io).

Everybody is welcome, it is usually a mix of MirageOS&OCaml experts and new people, which leads to a good knowledge transfer. Please sign up soon via mail, see details at http://retreat.mirage.io

Hello everyone, over the past few months, I've been working on a little project called Sketch.sh. It's a interactive notebook style (like IPython and Jupyter).

It uses Js_of_ocaml's toplevel to evaluate the code completely in browsers. You can save/share the sketch with a url as well.

I created this with the hope to lower the bar for learning OCaml/ReasonML in general. There are a lot of sketch made by people who is learning the language already!

The project is open source on Github so check it out.

I started to write a few posts on how opam should be used in my opinion and what to learn for someone comming from the javascript world. To support this effort, I think that compilation cache (I’m not sure that the name is correct, please tell me) is an important feature.

Some good work has already been done to tackle this issue. If you follow the instructions on this page, you should be able to experience instant switch creation or package installation. But it seems that there are still problems with ocamlfind.

As my skills are limited, I hope to motivate contributions on this task by providing a bounty. This is a 300 USD bounty. It can be found in this page: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/1250468-local-cache-of-binary-packages

As a side note, I am thinking that we could have a topic gathering the different existing bounties. I already created one to fix lwt ppx in the past. Ahrefs creates bounties now and then. One central point could help for visibility.

Here are links from many OCaml blogs aggregated at OCaml Planet.

• How to implement type theory in an hour
• Full Time: Lead Developer at HubTran in Chicago, Cincinnati, Remote
• Ann: A new ppx for tyre and new version of ppx_regexp | Drup's thingies