So I finally reached a good stopping point with my other side projects and spent some time yesterday investigating what it would take to bring them up on the multicore variant of the OCaml toolchain.
Answer: it looks tantalizingly possible. It wasn’t hard to fix OMake, for example, not to use effect as a variable name. Other things look more troubling. The tagged 4.06.1 release appears not to include an important C-language header file in its installation, and I think that might be fixed on trunk already. Other things look moderately difficult for a newcomer to approach, but I feel like I might be able to wrestle them to the ground if nobody better at these jobs have time for them.
For example, I noticed that the ocaml-migrate-parsetree project needs to be improved with comprehension of the new effect syntax. I spent some time yesterday investigating that, and I haven’t cracked it yet. Nevertheless, it still seems like something I can do provided with enough time on the calendar— my day job is intense and I have to steal time at home after everyone in the house is asleep to work on my side projects.
Question: what is everyone else working on to make multicore compatibility with the popular packages in the default OPAM repository happen? I’d like to contribute where I can, and I don’t want to duplicate work that somebody else might be able to get done faster.