[ANN] the OCaml Software Foundation

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We were all very busy during the last semester, and have been mostly quiet on the foundation activities, but of course our actions were running in the background. Some highlights:

  • Kate @kit-ty-kate Deplaix has worked on opam-repository QA for the OCaml 4.11 release, and the work and results are just as superb as for 4.10. We will fund Kate to work again on the upcoming 4.12 release.

  • We are funding ongoing maintenance work on ocaml-rs (a port of the OCaml FFI library from C to Rust) by its author and maintainer, Zach @zshipko Shipko. Zach did a big round of cleanup changes this summer, improving the overall design of the library and completing its feature set.

  • We are funding @JohnWhitington (the author of OCaml from the Very Beginning) to do some technical writing work for OCaml documentation. His contributions so far have been very diverse, from a script to harmonize the documentation of List and ListLabels (and Array and ArrayLabels, etc.) in the standard library, to small cleanups and improvement to ocaml.org web pages. One focus of his work is the upcoming documentation page “Up and running with OCaml”, taking complete newcomers through the basic setup, using the toplevel and building and running a Hello World. (ocaml.org#1165, rendered current state)

  • Two Outreachy internships were supervised this summer, focusing on the compiler codebase. Florian @Octachron Angeletti (INRIA) supervised an intern on adding a JSON format for some compiler messages (we expect PRs to be submitted soon). Vincent @vlaviron Laviron and Guillaume @zozozo Bury (OCamlPro) supervised an intern on reducing mutable state in the internal implementation.

  • Inspired by this Discuss thread, we are funding experimental work by @sanette on the HTML rendering of the OCaml manual. This work is in the process of being reviewed for upstreaming in the OCaml compiler distribution. (#9755.) This is a better end-result than I had initially expected.

(We also had a couple non-highlights. For example, we funded a sprint (physical development meeting) for the Owl contributors, with Marcello @mseri Seri doing all the organization work; it was planned for the end of March, and had to be postponed due to the pandemic.)

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