In the final installment of our series on the SyntaxDocumentation command, we delve into its integration within the OCaml VSCode Platform extension. Building on our previous discussions about Merlin and OCaml LSP, this article explores how to make SyntaxDocumentation an opt-in feature in the popular VSCode editor. In the first part of this series, Creating the SyntaxDocumentation Command - Part 1: Merlin, we explored how to create a new command in Merlin, particularly the SyntaxDocumentation command. In the second part, Creating the SyntaxDocumentation Command - Part 2: OCaml LSP, we looked at ..read more

The last post looked at using various tools to understand why an OCaml 5 program was waiting a long time for IO. In this post, I'll be trying out some tools to investigate a compute-intensive program that uses multiple CPUs. Table of Contents The problem ThreadSanitizer perf mpstat offcputime The OCaml garbage collector statmemprof magic-trace Tuning GC parameters Simplifying further perf sched olly magic-trace on the simple allocator perf annotate perf c2c perf stat Conclusions The problem OCaml 4 allowed running multiple "system threads", but only one can have the OCaml runtime lock, so on ..read more

According to my Linkedin profile, I have been writing code for a company for almost 6 years. During this time, I have worked on PHP and Wordpress projects, built e-commerce websites using NextJS and JavaScript, written small backends in Python with Django/Flask/Fastapi, and developed fintech systems in GO, among other things. I have come to realize that I value a good type system and prefer writing code in a more functional way rather than using object-oriented programming. For example, in GO, I prefer passing in arguments rather than creating a struct method. This is why I will be discussing ..read more

Neural networks are often thought of as opaque, black-box function approximators, but theoretical tools let us describe and visualize their behavior. In particular, let’s study piecewise-linearity, a property many neural networks share. This property has been studied before, but we’ll try to visualize it in more detail than has been previously done.  ..read more

In order to avoid long, confusing URLs on the OCaml Manual pages, we set out to create a solution that shortens these URLs, including section references, and contains the specific version. The result improves readability and user experience. This article outlines the motivation behind these changes and how we implemented them. Challenge The OCaml HTML manuals have URL references such as https://v2.ocaml.org/manual/types.html#sss:typexpr-sharp-types, and they do not refer to any specific compiler version. We needed a way to easily share a link with the version number included. The OCaml.org pag ..read more

OCaml FFI Sharp Edges and How to Avoid Them Ortac 0.3.0 Dynamic formal verification made easy dream-html and pure-html 3.5.2 The OCaml community is signed up for Outreachy! OCaml LSP 1.18.0 2nd editor tooling dev-meeting: 25th of July ? A (Possibly) Safer Interface to the Ctypes FFI OCaml Workshop 2024 at ICFP -- announcement and call for proposals living 0.1.0 Other OCaml News ..read more

Erin Murphy is Jane Street’s first UX designer, and before that, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory building user interfaces for space missions. She’s also an illustrator with her own quarterly journal. In this episode, Erin and Ron discuss the challenge of doing user-centered design in an organization where experts are used to building tools for themselves. How do you bring a command-line interface to the web without making it worse for power users? They also discuss how beauty in design is more about utility than aesthetics; what Jane Street looks for in UX candidates; and how to ..read more

We love hosting internships. It is rewarding to potentially facilitate someone’s first foray into the OCaml ecosystem, helping them establish a hopefully life-long foothold in the world of open-source programming. It is also a great opportunity to get new perspectives on existing issues. Fresh eyes can reinvigorate topics, highlighting different pain points and new solutions which benefit the entire community. Sometimes, we also find ourselves just trying to keep up with our interns as they take off like rocket ships! Recently, we mentored a student who did just that. The initial goal of the i ..read more

It might be tempting to think that we can write code that works perfectly the first time around, but in reality optimisation and troubleshooting forms a big part of programming. However, there are more and less productive (and frustrating!) ways of problem solving. Having the right tools to guide you, ones that show you where to look and what is going wrong, can make a huge difference. We recently introduced you to the monitoring system runtime_events, which allows users to monitor their runtime for, among other things, how programs are affecting performance. Alongside runtime_events, sits the ..read more

Feedback on this post is welcomed on Discuss! We are very pleased to announce the release of opam 2.2.0, and encourage all users to upgrade. Please read on for installation and upgrade instructions. NOTE: this article is cross-posted on opam.ocaml.org and ocamlpro.com, and published in discuss.ocaml.org. Try it! In case you plan a possible rollback, you may want to first backup your ~/.opam or $env:LOCALAPPDATAopam directory. The upgrade instructions are unchanged: Either from binaries: run For Unix systems bash -c "sh <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ocaml/opam/master/sh ..read more