OCaml Weekly News

Hello folks! :wave:

There's a new release of Uuidm, a library to handle universally unique identifiers (UUIDs).

This very old module has been slightly renovated implying a few deprecations, a quick start has been added to the docs and foremost new constructors and generators were added to support the latest RFC 9562 V7 time and random based UUID definitions; thanks to xen-api folks for getting the ball rolling on this. See the release notes for the details.

• Docs: online or odig doc uuidm
• Install: opam install uuidm (PR)

A big thanks to my donors.

Released 0.0.2 on opam. It feels like the project is in a good shape now.

Changes:

• support for nativeint, bytes, ref, unit
• add ~variant_as_array for compatibility with ppx_deriving_yojson
• support variant payloads
• support polymorphic variants inheritance
• fix encoding of tuples
• change encoding of variants from enum to anyOf

I'm considering making variant_as_array the default in 0.0.3 as it would be more consistent with the ocaml ecosystem.

I'm happy to announce a brand new version of Bogue, version 20240928, now availble on opam.

Changes are mostly under the hood. We have nice improvements by @edwin : automatic monitor vsync is now enabled by default, for smoother animations, and most importantly we finally align with the latest version of tsdl. It will simplify maintenance, but it also implies that too old versions of SDL will not work anymore. On the other hand we were kind of obliged to move forward, because tsdl.0.9.8 won't install on ocaml 5.2.

• if you're on Ubuntu 20.04, installing Bogue with opam install bogue will by default pull tsdl.1.1.0 in, which requires SDL >= 2.0.18, not shipped by the OS. A workaround is to explicitly require opam install tsdl.1.0.0 (or manually installing a newer SDL)
• if your OS ships SDL < 2.0.10 you have no other choice than manually installing a newer SDL (which is not that complicated)

Happy bogue-ing!

I am very pleased to announce a new release of Merlin for OCaml 5.2, 5.1 and 4.14. This release brings a handful of fixes but also a handful of of new commands:

• signature_help and inlay_hint have been upstreamed from ocaml-lsp-server
• expand_node a command to get the ppxed-source when called on relevant annotations
• 🕵️‍♀️ search-by-type a sherlodoc-inspired syntax to search for values in the environment, that superseeds polarity-search.

Only search-by-type has an Emacs binding right now (and one for vim on is in the works), we hope to have some time to work on more client implementations in the near future.

demo1

demo2

Dear OCaml developers,

we're pleased to finally release a full stack of packages that do not rely on Cstruct.t/Bigarray, but use string / bytes instead. This brings us a massive performance boost (e.g. a factor of 3 in tls), and brings a easier to comprehend API. It also makes performance tooling work much more smoothly with our released packages. We announced this upcoming change earlier this year https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-mirage-crypto-0-11-3-with-more-speed-for-elliptic-curves-and-the-future-roadmap-of-mirage-crypto

For further details, please see the specific release pages:

• mirage-crypto 1.0.0 (also 1.0.1, and 1.1.0) - cryptographic operations in OCaml (symmetric ciphers, asymmetric ciphers (RSA, DSA, DH), fortuna (a cryptographic secure pseudo random number generator), elliptic curves (from fiat-crypto) – the hash algorithms have been removed - use digestif instead
• tls 1.0.0 (also 1.0.1, 1.0.2, and 1.0.3) - a Transport layer security implementation (HTTPS) in OCaml, supporting TLS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3
• x509 1.0.0 (also 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3, and 1.0.4) - X509 certificates (signing requests, certificate revocation lists, PKCS12)
• asn1-combinators 0.3.0 (also 0.3.1 and 0.3.2) - ASN.1 parser combinators
• let's encrypt 1.0.0 - a client for https://letsencrypt.org - automated TLS certificate issuance
• awa 0.4.0 - a SSH client and server implementation
• kdf 1.0.0 - supporting different key derivation functions: hkdf (used in TLS), PBKDF2, SCRYPT
• paf 0.7.0 - protocol-agnostic client (http / http2)
• git 3.17.0 - an implementation of the version control system git https://git-scm.com
• dns 9.0.0 (also 9.0.1) - an implementation of the domain name system

As you can envision, there was a lot of coordination and releasing involved in preparing these API-breaking changes. The list above likely misses various packages that have been released to support the new mirage-crypto and tls API.

There have already been various issues reported and fixed in the subsequent minor releases. We encourage you to upgrade your software stack to the new release series, and report issues while you encounter them (being it API questions, or correctness issues). Earlier releases are not maintained anymore (due to lack of interest and lack of time), thus if you encounter issues in earlier releases, please first update to the most recent releases (although this may need some effort – a PR that uses the packages heavily is https://github.com/robur-coop/miragevpn/pull/279). If you're stuck or lack time to port your code to the new API, we at robur offer commercial support in upgrading your codebase. Reach out to us via email: team@robur.coop.

This work has been conducted by the robur collective. Parts of this work was sponsored by Tarides.

After a respectable pause, I've now imported these videos into the Watch.OCaml.org instance so we have a non-YouTube mirror. They're up on the OCaml Workshop 2023 channel now. Enjoy your ad-free viewing! :slight_smile:

Hi Dune enthusiasts! :camel:

We will hold our regular Dune dev meeting tomorrow, on Wednesday, October, 2nd at 16:00 CET. As usual, the session will be one hour long.

Whether you are a maintainer, a regular contributor, a new joiner or just curious, you are welcome to join: these discussions are opened! The goal of these meetings is to provide a place to discuss the ongoing work together and synchronise between the Dune developers :smile:

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

• [OCaML'23] Modern DSL compiler architecture in OCaml our experience with Catala
• [OCaML'23] Eio 1.0 – Effects-based IO for OCaml 5
• [OCaML'23] Less Power for More Learning: Restricting OCaml Features for Effective Teaching
• [OCaML'23] Efficient OCaml compilation with Flambda 2
• [OCaML'23] Buck2 for OCaml Users & Developers
• [OCaML'23] Parallel Sequences in Multicore OCaml
• [OCaML'23] Building a lock-free STM for OCaml
• [OCaML'23] MetaOCaml Theory and Implementation
• [OCaML'23] Osiris: an Iris-based program logic for OCaml
• [OCaML'23] State of the OCaml Platform 2023
• [OCaML'23] Owi: an interpreter and a toolkit for WebAssembly written in OCaml
• [OCaML'23] Targeted Static Analysis for OCaml C Stubs: Eliminating gremlins from the code
• Introducing Dune: The Essential Build System for OCaml Developers
• Summer of Internships: Projects From the OCaml Compiler Team