Using Base (or other stdlib replacements) with Menhir

Ecosystem
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I’ve been using Menhir a bit recently with Jane Street’s libraries. With Core_kernel, things work as I want them to. However, if I instead use Base, I run into the following dilemma:

  1. If I open Base at the top of a .mly file, I can use Base throughout the code that I write. However, having Base opened breaks things in the generated code, because Menhir uses functions like Printf.printf that no longer exist. I can get around this with stuff like module Printf = struct include Printf let fprintf = Stdio.Out_channel.fprintf, but that’s ugly and requires manually catching the missing functions.

  2. I can instead just open Base locally in the expressions where I actually want to use it, but having let open Base in spread around is a bit clunky, given that Base is supposed to be functioning as a standard library.

I’m curious to know if anyone else has dealt with this issue, and how they’ve solved it.

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This won’t help you directly, but I suggest raising an issue wherever Menhir tracks bugs, because generated code should always go through a uniquely named module (e.g. MenhirRuntime) to access the external things so that it at least gets some semblance of hygiene.

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Is this issue already raised? According to Opam, Menhir uses an email address as a tracker, so one can’t know: https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/menhir/