Happy new year!
This is an update on recent works of the OCaml Software Foundation, covering our 2024 actions – the previous update was in January 2024.
The OCaml Software Foundation is a non-profit foundation (earlier thread) that receives funding from our industrial sponsors each year, and tries its best to spend it to support and strengthen the OCaml ecosystem and community.
The funding volume we receive each year is around 200K€. (For comparison: this is the yearly cost of one experienced full-time software engineer in many parts of the world.) We do not fund people full-time for long periods. Most actions receive from 3K€ to 20K€. The work to prepare and execute actions is mostly done by the (unpaid) Executive Committee. It is currently formed by Nicolás Ojeda Bär, Damien Doligez, Xavier Leroy, Kim Nguyễn, Virgile Prevosto and myself, with administrative personnel provided by INRIA and general assistance by Alan Schmitt.
Our current sponsors (thanks!) are ahrefs, Jane Street, Tezos, Bloomberg, Lexifi, SimCorp, MERCE and Tarides. (If your company would like to join as a sponsor, please get in touch. Unfortunately, we still cannot efficiently process small donations, so we are not calling for individual donations.)
Feel free to use this thread for questions/suggestions 
Recent actions
Education and outreach
We funded a new edition of the Spanish summer school on functional programming in OCaml, organized in Saragossa by Ricardo Rodriguez and Roberto Blanco.
We continued funding the OCaml meetups in Paris and Toulouse, France. In 2024, a new meetup started in Chennai, India (first discuss thread), which we are delighted to support as well.
We are sponsoring the JFLA 2025, a functional programming conference in France, and an OCaml Bridge Workshop at Functional Conf 2025, a large Asian conference on functional programming.
Research
The OCaml Software Foundation is typically not involved in funding research, focusing on actions that have an immediate impact on the language and its community. Nevertheless, in 2023 we funded one year of post-doctoral work for Takafumi Saikawa in relation to his maintenance work on the type-checker of OCaml. In 2024 we funded one year of research engineer for the Salto project, building a static analyzer for OCaml, and one year of PhD grant for Alistair O’Brien in Cambridge (complementing other funding sources for a full PhD), continuing his impressive work on constraint-based type inference for OCaml.
Ecosystem
Infrastructure
As in previous years, we fund the work of Kate Deplaix to check that the OCaml ecosystem is compatible with upcoming compiler releases; in 2024 Kate worked on OCaml 5.2 and 5.3.
We are trying our best to support the work of opam-repository maintainers, through individual funding grants for the active maintainers. This year, on the suggestion of the repository maintainers, we are also funding the work of Robur to migrate unmaintained packages to a separate archive (discuss thread 1, thread 2).
Tools
In 2024 we have funded one month of maintenance of the opam client by Raja Boujbel and her colleagues.
We renewed our partial support for the work of Antonio Monteiro on Melange. For more Melange news, see for example the announcement of Melange 4.
Libraries
We keep supporting the work of Petter Urkedal on the Caqti library, the main database connection library in the OCaml community.
The Owl library for scientific computing has been restructuring in 2024, with its two maintainers moving to permanent jobs demanding their time and therefore less available. The OCaml Software Foundation is providing a small grant to help the maintainers transition to a different contribution model and/or preserve a part of their maintenance activity, as they think is best.
We have been funding documentation work by John Whitington to collect or create usage examples of important OCaml libraries, prior to their upstreaming in the documentation of each project. See his ocaml-nursery repository.
We support the contributions of Daniel Bünzli to the OCaml ecosystem. This year, Daniel used this support to fund the development of
- jsont, a new library for declarative JSON data manipulation
- bytesrw, a library of composable byte stream readers and writes, with support for various compression and hashing algorithms
- support for Unicode 16.0 in his Unicode libraries
Finally, we have been funding Nathan Rebours to take an active part in the maintenance of the ppxlib project, see his ppxlib maintenance summary.