Still 🪀ing somewhat, but various nice things happened this week.

Star Wars Day marked the opening, finally, of the test harness for Relocatable OCaml in ocaml/ocaml#14014, along with a smaller PR with various bits of CI nonsense (ocaml/ocaml#14013). That got merged fairly swiftly (thanks Antonin!). Chipping away at getting the three main PRs finally ready to be opened, but that can’t actually happen until the test harness is reviewed and in…

Still in OCaml-land, FlexDLL had accumulated quite a collection of fixes, and having got the last one merged, I figured it was high time for a release.

Changed tack (finally) had some fun playing with OxCaml, versus just getting it packaged and installable. By sheer coincidence, then met up with the “Cambridge” Jane Street trio (Dolan-Barnes-Shinwell), who were marking the rollout of “runtime5” (i.e. OCaml 5.2) at JS with a little pub outing.

I finally watched the entire talk I’d been encouraging many people to watch for several months (I had skimmed it before!!). It’s bittersweet for me: quite a few of the tricks here are things I’ve advocated for a long time in opam, but it’s very cool to have another example to point at. I got nerd-sniped by a couple of things in the talk, and was hoping to be able to see if there were some possible OxCaml ideas - however, on this occasion it turned out that there were some easy victories to be scored (see ocaml/opam#6515; I may have accidentally launched a kernel build with make -j and no number, although hopefully my laptop will survive). Anyway, pretty cool to get opam show dune which takes about 1s on my laptop to display anything down to 140ms with only a train journey’s-and-a-bit of merciless hacking.

Lots of musings around uv and discussions with Patrick and Ryan. Already toying with the idea of validating Mark’s bulk-builder work (that’s in use already on the pipelines for the OCaml docs CI) by plugging it into an experimental Dune version. Now toying with whether it would not be too crazy to put an experimental tool together instead (there’s I think still a screaming ecosystem gap in OCaml for uvx or uv run - neither idea’s original to uv, but putting them under the one roof, cargo-style, looks kinda awesome). But there’s always the screaming sound of xkcd#927.