The goal of OCaml Labs is to push OCaml and functional programming forward as a platform, making it a more effective tool for current users (including significant industrial users) and at the same time growing the appeal of the language, broadening its applicability and popularity by a combination of technological advancements, creation of community infrastructure, and public communications.
This effort is run across multiple groups in the Computer Laboratory, primarily the SRG and PLS, and including collaborators from the Security, CompArch and DTG groups. We would like to especially thank our primary funder, Jane Street, for their generous support.
Displaying his own true sense of style, Romain Calascibetta added an incredibly detailed (and hilariously funny) PR for integrating his new Git implementation into ocaml-git - using the new implementation!
Whilst porting a large portion of Mirage libraries to use Jbuilder, the MirageOS core team realised it was also a great opportunity to reorganise the package structure of some specific libraries, update/remove old code and improve overall functionality.
Following some minor releases in the last month, OCaml 4.05.0 was released today and is available as an opam switch, or from source.
The OCaml community has helped uncover a serious microcode defect on Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake processors with hyper-threading enabled. Debian have issued a security advisory encouraging users of systems with the affected processors to apply the BIOS/UEFI update, or disable hyper-threading.
Jeremy Yallop has submitted an extensive PR to add support for unsigned 32-bit and 64-bit integers. This feature is frequently requested, and the PR details the motivation behind the addition of primitive types, standard library modules, syntax for expressions and patterns, as well as suggesting ideas for future enhancement.
Every year, May and June bring a hive of activity to the Computer Lab, and 2017 is no exception!
Yesterday we welcomed attendees from Docker, Microsoft Research (MSR), Barclays, OCaml Labs, Jane Street and Citrix to a Jbuilder discussion and demonstration. This is the first informal Tech Talk of a possible future series at Docker, and we experimented with live remote access and video recording. Huge thanks to the Docker team for providing the venue and Zoom!
We held the 17th Compiler Hacking Event this week, on a balmy Cambridge evening, and we’ve added summaries of what everyone was working on that evening including:
This beta 3 release brings speed and stability improvements, replaces the opam build command with opam install <dir>, provides a clearer interface for handling package test and doc dependencies, and extends the CLI in a few areas.
KC has just merged the Multicore OCaml ARM64 backend! We also have a memory model for multicore OCaml and a sane compilation scheme to ARM64