OCaml Weekly News

Reading this discussion inspired me to write this:

https://notes.orbitalfox.eu/distributing-software.html

I hope it helps. It doesn't cover all the points raised here. Any constructive remarks are welcome.

We are very pleased to announce the first release of our PyTorch bindings for ocaml. These bindings provide a NumPy like tensor library with GPU acceleration and support for automatic differentiation.

The torch package can be installed via opam. More details can be found in the github repo, including a tutorial training some neural networks on the MNIST dataset, various deep-learning examples: Generative Adverserial Networks, Neural Style Transfer, state of the art computer vision models on CIFAR-10, etc. Pre-trained weights for some recent computer vision models are also provided.

Any feedback is very welcome. Hopefully we will write a couple new tutorials to describe the current examples and add more examples in the next few weeks.

(note that the tensorflow package providing TensorFlow bindings also has been updated this week and is now up to speed with the github repo)

Here is a new release of Lablgtk 2 and 3. There are only a few bug fixes and improvements, but this should provide a better basis for packagers.

They are available for download at the usual location:
http://lablgtk.forge.ocamlcore.org
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/frs/download.php/1774/lablgtk-3.0.beta2.tar.gz
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/frs/download.php/1773/lablgtk-2.18.7.tar.gz

The code and bug reports are on GitHub
https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk
https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk/tree/lablgtk3 (for the lablgtk3 branch)

My first OPAM package, travesty, is now in the repository :tada:

FYI, The Monads library is also pretty Core stylish, as not only it implements the Core monad interface (that keeps changing from version to version of the Core library), but it also provides [the container interface][1]. Basically, the traversal.

[1]: http://binaryanalysisplatform.github.io/bap/api/v1.3.0/Monads.Std.Monad.Collection.html

I've been TA-ing a course on functional programming in OCaml at ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, since September and it's just over now. Students, 4th year students after the "baccalauréat" (how do you call them? graduates? postgraduates?), had to follow several lectures as well as roughly 10 seminars and 10 lab sessions. The whole course was completely revamped this year, so we also decided to use Jbuilder (not Dune, as we had to set up an infrastructure long before Dune 1.0) for our lab sessions.

Overall, the experience has been very nice, so kudos to Dune developers!

However, we also had a few issues that I would like to report for the record (Cc: @diml @rgrinberg ), and perhaps to foster a few evolutions of Dune (or to be shown how to solve them easily : we may have missed some information in the documentation).

1. jbuilder runtest sometimes just hangs while running, I'll try to devise an MWE later but I'm still reporting this in case this is already a known issue.
2. Sometimes we wanted to have a program open a file whose path would be relative to the source code itself and harcoded in the ML file. For instance, the OCaml file contained something like open_in "./foo". Unfortunately, it seems Jbuilder doesn't run runtest and utop from the same working directory, hence depending on the path written in the ML file, one of these commands failed. Is there an easy way to solve this? (We know we could use an absolute path to some location, but we have dozens of PCs running on a university network, so the configuration is not as flexible as one could expect. We'd also like to avoid passing the path on the commandline.)
3. I already spoke about this in another post (https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/dune-link-against-cmo-cmi-without-source/2488/8) but I'm writing this here too: we sometimes like to provide students with a .cmi/.cmo file pair but no source code. AFAIK there's no simple, straightforward way to do this with Dune alone…

Well that's about it. We met a couple of other problems but they could be solved in a reasonably easy way. The only trouble now is that, sometimes, students would like to create their own jbuild file or update one we have provided, and it's a bit hard for them to know how to proceed (and the Dune documentation is good but perhaps more aimed at regular developers than students). I expect future versions of Dune or some Dune plugins, or even other tools, to ease setting up basic projects without writing the dune file yourself (e.g. something like dune new-lib mylib or dune add-dep mylib core_kernel).

I agree that the Dune docs by themselves are not the best starting point. Maybe some of the links here would be helpful: https://ocamlverse.github.io/content/quickstart.html

https://dune.build/blog/new-computation-model/ A blog post about the new computation model that Dune is built on.

The ppxlib team is pleased to announce the release of ppxlib 0.4.0. This release adds better support for defining compile-time interpretation of dotted operators such as +.+ and also improves integration with other tools such as reason or metaocaml by no longer complaining about attributes generated by these tools. In particular, ppxlib now treats all attributes whose name start with an _ as machine generated attributes and doesn't complain if it can't decide whether they have been correctly interpreted or not. FTR, ppxlib tries to detect attributes and extension points that are dead-code, in order to catch typing mistakes or misplacement.

Here is the full changelog for this release:

• Do not report errors about dropped or uninterpreted attributes starting with _ (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#46, fix ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#40, @diml)
• Fix he special_function rule for dotted operators and allow Longident.parse to parse dotted operators (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#44, @Octachron)
• Port to dune and remove use of bash (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#45, @rgrinberg)
• Ignore all attribites starting with _ (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#46, @diml)
• Reserve the reason and refmt namespaces (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#46, @diml)
• Reserve the metaocaml namespace (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#50, @rgrinberg)
• Fix attribute extraction for Otag/Rtag (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#51, @xclerc)
• Do not relocate files unless -loc-filename is passed (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#55, @hhugo)
• Perserve the filename in the output (ocaml-ppx/ppxlib#56, @hhugo)

We are pleased to announce the release of opam 2.0.2.

This new version contains mainly backported fixes, you can find more information in this blog post.

Note that as sandbox scripts have been updated, don't forget to run opam init --reinit -ni to update yours.

opam is a source-based package manager for OCaml. It supports multiple simultaneous compiler installations, flexible package constraints, and a Git-friendly development workflow.

Thanks @rjbou! :) For anyone on Ubuntu that wants a quick upgrade, the opam2 PPA has been updated with this release as well.

Here is a sneak peek at some potential future features of the Ocaml compiler, discussed by their implementers in these Github Pull Requests.

• Make caml-mode an independent project

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

• ocaml-http–migration-to-github
• opam 2.0.2 release
• opam 2.0.2 release
• MirageOS, towards a smaller and safer OS