Claude Code has committed in trunk OCaml! With great power comes great responsibility, and all that...

Fantastic special series of episodes of @timharford.ft.com and co’s More or Less occupying the BBC Radio 4 9am slot *every day* this week

I was implicitly referred to as a “hoary greybeard” the other day… my son just innocently asked how long I’ve worked on/in OCaml and I realised the answer is half my life 👴🏻 #old #greybeard

It’s merged!! 🥳🥳🥳

Haven’t had to use a paper train ticket in a looong time, and was somewhat bemused to see the machine list that it would be printing two seat reservations. I am duly sat in my first non-specific seat of the day. Nice paper-saving there, @greateranglia.bsky.social!

Aaaand, breathe again… 😮‍💨 github.com/ocaml/ocaml/...

There are some minor corrections to be made in each branch, but Relocatable OCaml has passed its defence!

Being British, I’m of course able to read this both negatively and positively 🫢 news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585...

Unsure whether to be more shocked by the discovery that there will be 10 current/former lay clerks singing at this morning’s mass at Westminster Cathedral (first time for a decade?) or that they’ve completely renovated the 100 year old song school toilets!

Quite an extreme case of rewrite-it-in-Rust… www.nature.com/articles/d41...

3 years since I finalised the demo of it for the OCaml Workshop in Ljubljana, Relocatable OCaml is finally submitted for review! 🥳🍾🎊

Currently dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s and therefore wishing I’d used fewer ‘i’s and ‘t’s in my code (also, when I did I start handwriting code?? 🤔) #relocatable #ocaml

Reeling in shock and awe at just how simple and fast live-moving VM storage is in Hyper-V #scarred-by-esxi

Wonders how much water Apple could save each year by having Apple Mail offer to reduce the size of photos being emailed from an iPad in the same way as it does on an iPhone? 🤔🧐🤫

Remembering the grandfather who could not forgive so that hopefully we might learn from it #VJ80

“I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this particular part of Hertfordshire, but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.” Good old Oscar 🤣

Congratulations to Apple for anticlimax of the month with Apple “Intelligence”. In a metaphor for the age, seems all the time has been spent on the animations and hype and not a lot on it actually doing anything 🤷🏻‍♂️ #unabletosummarisethismessage

Yet another small OCaml/OxCaml diff has been squished! Polymorphic parameters has just gotten merged upstream: github.com/ocaml/ocaml/... There's more to go (include functor, for example: github.com/ocaml/RFCs/p...), but it's nice to see more progress in this space.

Testing opam packages for Relocatable OCaml which actually take advantage of it. Creating a new switch using the same version as one you've already built in another switch now takes 5 seconds, rather than 2 minutes (cloning the compiler itself takes just 100ms of that 5 seconds!)

Is it late enough in the day to be allowed to acknowledge the #oxcaml themed Wordle?

Some very strong resonances for me (with thanks to @chshersh.com for drawing into my view over on X…)

Childishly amused that the journey from Cambridge to Newcastle begins with a train to Liverpool #weregoingthewrongway

I'm pleased to announce OxCaml! OxCaml is Jane Street's branch of OCaml. We've given it a new name and a snazzy logo, and done a bunch of work to make it easy for people to try.

1994 (and earlier): select text in one “app”, copy, paste to another “app” 2025: select text in one app, copy, switch to other app and discover they’ve disabled paste on the input fields. Return to other app. Write information on piece of paper. Type into other app. #progress #modern

Oh my goodness! 😳 #wato #bbcr4

Fell through a wormhole and sang the Solemn Passion + traditional Tallis Lamentations at Westminster Cathedral today. Realised the last time I did that was 17 years ago 🥺😳👴🏻

Uncle Sam abruptly turns off funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Wondering if this is a judging stare about the delays getting Relocatable OCaml’s first pull request opened, or possibly something else… 🐈‍⬛ #catcaml

Possibly using them gratuitously, but I’m liking OCaml 5.4’s labelled tuples for logic setting up predicates. Nice to avoid stuff like let p1, p2, (* … *) = if (* something *) then (true, false, false, true, true) else if (* … *) but without the weight of having to declare a record #ocaml

This is not an April Fool! #IYKYK #ocaml

uh oh AI safety meets OCaml and the seatbelts have come off real fast

Initial idea - July 2019 Design proposal (before any code! 😇) - November 2019 Initial prototype - September 2021 Working prototype - September 2022 Candidate implementation - April 2025 #RAD 🫣

Always check what Copilot’s doing 😜

Finally - Relocatable OCaml in “fully relocatable” mode is also reproducible (as long as the C compiler is reproducible) and passes its testsuite 😮‍💨🥳🎉🍾🎊

Love this - especially the last line 😂 - but particularly because while doing something else in the OCaml runtime this week, I did scroll by and briefly pause on one of the (doubly) linked lists in the runtime’s memory allocator 🥸🤣

PostScript 😂😁

Encountered printf-debugging? Today I raise you "ls -l"-debugging 😂

OCaml 5.3.0 is out discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-5-3-...! Thanks to the considerable efforts of my colleagues, it includes the restored MSVC port (the draft was my Christmas 2022 OCaml hacking). Hopefully 5.4.0 will conclude another 2021/22 bit of hacking with Relocatable OCaml and faster opam switches!

Woah 🤯🔥☄️ Surface Pro X (Microsoft SQ2; Oct 2020) vs Surface Laptop 7 (Snapdragon X Elite; Jun 2024): ➡️ configure tree — 69s vs 28s (loads of x64 emulation) ➡️ make -j — 6:44 vs 2:42 ➡️ make -C testsuite parallel — 14:19 vs 4:35 (almost pure ARM64)

Turns out `raise Not_found;;` touches nearly all the required corners, but that’s natdynlink now fully working and the entire testsuite passing. Started working on a Windows-on-Arm OCaml prototype in September 2020 - just over 4 years to get it finished is pretty good for my track record 😜😁 #ocaml

Entered `let x = 42;;` and finally received the response `val x : int = 42` instead of a segfault 🥳 🤓 #arm64 #windows

How can we be at 8 issues of the open group standard base specifications and there still isn’t a portable *simple* way to get from, say “false” to “/usr/bin/false”?

as a kid, i fixed my parent's computer. as an adult I fix my kids's computer. pretty sure we are the only gen that knows how computers work

Word of this morning is ‘procaffeinate’: to put everything on hold until you’ve had sufficient amounts of coffee.

Concluded doing battle with over-privileged Windows GitHub Actions runners and now debating whether a tool designed to drop privileges and run a command should be called sudont or dontas

Scrolling both “Discover” and “Following” desperately looking for all the unsolicited adverts - where are they? 🤷🏻