Hi everyone,
A small report on the actions that we launched since my initial posting.
(There was also some progress on the “enabling individual donations” front, maybe something will be possible in the next few months. Don’t start holding your breath yet.)
- We are funding the “Leafs” research project in Lisbon to develop teaching material for theoretical-computer-science courses (automata and stuff) in OCaml, with interactive visualization components, some of which will hopefully be integrated in the Learn-OCaml platform over the course of 2020/2021.
- We provide funding for the Gallium/Cambium research team at INRIA Paris (France), an active place for OCaml-related fundamental research (some of the team members are also very active on the implementation front, for example Xavier Leroy, Damien Doligez, Florian @octachron Angeletti, and Sébastien Hinderer).
- We sponsor the SWERC programming contest for 2019-2020, and in return the contest added OCaml to the list of available languages. Most participants to these competitive-programming events use C++, but we talked to past and active participants who said they would be interested in using OCaml on some problems with more symbolic computation.
- Over the course of the OCaml 4.10 release process, we are funding work by @kit-ty-kate to have a wide look at the ecosystem and improve compatibility with the upcoming release. (I believe that the upstream PR #9176 is a first result of this effort.)
- In reaction to the Discourse thread Suggestions for OCaml documentation, we are planning to fund further work by @sanette to experiment with the HTML rendering of the OCaml manual, in coordination with @octachron to try to upstream improvements when reasonably possible.
- We got in touch with the Owl project to sponsor a development sprint in 2020.