Dear OCaml Community,
On behalf of the OCaml.org team, I’m thrilled to announce the publication of the new Get Started documentation.
It is organised in three stages:
- Installing OCaml, which guides you through the installation of opam, the initialisation of a switch and the installation of Platform tools.
- A Tour of OCaml, which walks you through the basics of the OCaml language and invites you to use the top-level to start playing with the language.
- Your First OCaml Program, which is a bit more practical and assumes you’re using an editor to help you create your first executable using Dune.
In addition to these, you’ll also find introductory guides on the tooling to complement the introduction to the language:
Our goal is to make OCaml.org the best resource to get started with and learn OCaml.
There are still a lot of gaps to fill in the documentation – and we’ll continue to work on these in the coming months – but the Get Started experience is probably the most important part of the documentation to alleviate friction points that discourage new users from adopting OCaml. As such, don’t hesitate to publicise these, but most importantly, let us know your feedback!
A warm thank you to everyone who contributed to the new documentation. In particular, credit goes to @cuihtlauac for writing A Tour of OCaml and Your First OCaml Program pages, and improving Installing OCaml; @professor.rose for writing Introduction to opam Switches and Fix Homebrew Errors on Apple M1; and @sabine, @professor.rose, @cuihtlauac, @chshersh, @tuohy, @NickBarnes, and @mobileink for their careful review of all the new documentation.
Happy reading!