OCaml Weekly News

We made a new release of bs-platform, feedback is very much appreciated! https://bucklescript.github.io/blog/2019/08/12/release-5-10-0

One feature that might interest you is that we support NODE_PATH in dependency resolving so that in theory you can use opam to install bucklescript packages, the directory layout is no longer tied to node_modules

it is my pleasure to announce the x509 0.7 series, which contains a major revision of the API (using a map instead of lists for extensions, general and distinguished names, …). The release 0.7.1 is already merged into the opam-repository, and users of x509 have been updated to comply with the new API. I wrote a blog post about this release – https://hannes.nqsb.io/Posts/X50907. I'm happy to receive feedback, either in this topic, via eMail, or via social media.

In the continuation of my last announcement, here’s another page containing a collection of simple projects showing how to use Dune for building and using Opam packages :

https://github.com/jserot/dune-howto

In the hope this can be useful to anyone starting to use these powerful tools.

Again, comments, bug reports and suggestions for improvements welcome.

On the "good news" side, we were finally able to review and merge support for dynlinked code in ocamldebug (in trunk, not 4.08; https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/8654), which could be a big help for people using ocamldebug with plugins – some Coq hackers do this, for example.

I think that everyone can just provide their suggestions about ppx here: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/the-future-of-ppx/3766, which is a proper place for discussing the future of this subsystem.

I also cleaned up the list in https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/the-end-of-camlp4/4216/2, removed obsolete projects and these that were fixed since already. Many of them also dropped the camlp4 dependency, but not made release yet. Added the issues links to those that are at GitHub, for tracking the progress.

OCaml batteries included is a community maintained extension of the OCaml standard library.

The batteries maintainers are pleased to announce the latest release: v2.10.0. This minor release adds support for OCaml 4.08.0.

Bug reports, pull requests and user feedback are warmly welcome, see the project page at https://github.com/ocaml-batteries-team/batteries-included/

The library's API documentation can be found at: http://ocaml-batteries-team.github.io/batteries-included/hdoc2/

After an opam update your should be able to do an opam upgrade batteries an enjoy this new release.

This release is compatible with OCaml 4.08.0, but it is not complete with respect to the standard library of OCaml 4.08.0: this release saw a lot of changes to the standard library, which have not yet been made available in the corresponding Batteries module. This means that users of OCaml 4.08.0 (and Batteries 2.10.0) will have access to these functions, but users of older OCaml versions (and Batteries 2.10.0) will not. If you are looking for this kind of backward-compatibility of new functions, as provided by previous Batteries releases, we recommend trying the stdcompat library.

Change log entries:

• added LazyList.equal: ('a -> 'b -> bool) -> 'a t -> 'b t -> bool #811 (Marshall Abrams, review by Gabriel Scherer)
• added BatList.fold_while : ('acc -> 'a -> bool) -> ('acc -> 'a -> 'acc) -> 'acc -> 'a list -> 'acc * 'a list #889 (Francois Berenger, Thibault Suzanne)
• fix BatNum.of_float_string on inputs between -1 and 0: "-0.5" or "-.5" would be interpreted as "0.5" or ".5". #886, #887 (Gabriel Scherer, report by Marcel Hark)
• added BatHashtbl.merge and merge_all #891 (Cedric Cellier, Francois Berenger, Gabriel Scherer)

v0.0.2 has just been published which has a few small adjustements. See the release notes.

Hi! I've been getting going in OCaml over the last couple weeks and wrote down my very basic notes, more about the ecosystem and learning resources than the language itself. It might seem obvious once you're deep in OCaml, but it actually was kind of confusing figuring out even the simplest lay of the land. This is kind of a silly soft question, but any suggestions for other tools, libraries, learning resources, things that would be nice to know about?

Have you found Ocamlverse? We'd also love to have contributions.

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

• Deriving Slowly
• Do applied programming languages research at Jane Street!
• X509 0.7
• BAP Knowledge Representation - Part 1