The OCaml Changelog

The OCaml.org team is happy to announce the OCaml Changelog: a feed of the latest releases and feature highlights of the OCaml Compiler, OCaml Platform tools, and other core projects.

Beyond being the easiest way to stay up to date with the activity of official projects, the Changelog serves as a way to discover important new features that might otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, did you know that Dune 3.7 introduced native polling mode for Windows, effectively making watch mode available on Windows (contributed by @nojb and @yams-yams)? Or that we recently released Mdx 2.3.0 with support for running code blocks in mld files (contributed by @jonludlam)? Or that we added new options in OCamlFormat for more consistent vertical formatting of if-else and match statements (contributed by @gpetiot)?

To that end, we’re highlighting important features from the releases with visual demos and explanations of how to use them.

I’ll note that the Changelog is still experimental at this point. We’ve talked with some maintainers of the projects featured on the Changelog, but we’ll need to agree with everyone on what the release process of the tools will look like if we commit to maintaining the Changelog in the long term. Until we’ve reached a consensus, the OCaml.org team will be monitoring the activity of the projects and create the changelog entries, eventually reaching out to maintainers to write announcements and feature highlights.

In the meanwhile, let us know what you think and how we can improve the Changelog, we’re excited to get your feedback!

Happy reading!

32 Likes

Very cool, thanks for doing this! I would personally find it useful to have an associated RSS feed, to be able to follow the changelog from my RSS client, if that’s something that you might consider adding :-).

10 Likes

Absolutely! I’ve added this to the issue tracker: Improve the OCaml Changelog · Issue #1125 · ocaml/ocaml.org · GitHub

Thanks for the suggestion :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

This is super cool! Thank you.
Exciting to see so many quality-of-life improvements coming to the OCaml ecosystem.

3 Likes

Very cool, thanks! :+1:

The page is very long for a mobile device though, maybe consider displaying the entries by year?

Also, it looks like there’s an invisible div overflowing somewhere, see this screenshot:

1 Like

I think that’s a great idea, but you should make the new changelog more visible on ocaml.org. Right now it seems it’s only linked in the footer and I doubt many people even scroll to it. I’d place it more prominently (e.g. perhaps in the header or the community section)

1 Like

Very helpful and convenient.

Any plans to add a RSS feed?

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An RSS feed is the most requested feature for the OCaml Changelog so far, so it’s likely to come at the top of the list of things we’ll work on when we loop back on the Changelog.

A bit of advertisement: there’s already an RSS feed at OCaml.org blog, so adding one for the Changelog shouldn’t be too difficult. It would be a very good first issue if anyone here is tempted to contribute to OCaml.org.