Just a quick clarification : Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years. > With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore > Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml > code. > My wording awkwardly suggests that all the mentioned tools are Ocamlcore projects. This is not true : - ocamlfind and godi are tools from Gerd Stolpmann and have been around for much longer; if you want to help the ocaml ecosystem, it's a good idea to begin by writing META files for all your released projects; they are very simple to write from an existing example, and very useful in combination with ocamlfind - ocamlbuild is from Nicolas Pouillard and Berke Durak; it is a simple and extensible compilation system for OCaml, but relatively new; other build systems for OCaml exist, such as OCamlMakefile (a generic GNU Makefile to help write usual makefiles for OCaml program) and OMake. On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Gabriel Scherer wrote: > 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss > >> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company >> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on >> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's >> team of course. >> > > Xavier Leroy has already said, for example during the former OCaml > Meetings, that they would be happy to link to a more complete "OCaml > distribution" provided by the community, including the core "INRIA lib" and > some more. I think there is no clear consensus right now on what that would > be, and that's why it hasn't been done yet, but there are several orthogonal > efforts in that direction (more on that later). > > > 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss > >> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have >> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have >> more users than a complete alternative. >> > [...] >> > I think it would be important and interesting to create a little >> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a >> synthesis of all these "standard" library. >> > > Batteries is meant to be an extension of INRIA's stdlib, as a continuation > of the [Extlib] effort. Great care is taken that a code using the existing > standard library should be able to replace it with Batteries without > changing a line of code. If something breaks when converting to batteries, > it should be filed as a bug. > > [Extlib] http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/ > > The Core library from Jane Street has liberated itself from this > conservative position. Programs should be written directly using Core, and > it is not in principle easy to transition from INRIA's stdlib to Core (of > course you could include both and be careful to avoid conflicts with > "open"). The advantages are plenty: it allows Janestreet to provide a > coherent set of packages and make different design choices (arguably some > aspects of INRIA's stdlib are more "non choices"). On the other hand, it > means that direct "synthesis" of both efforts (Core and Batteries) is not > likely. There is also the difference that Batteries is a community-driven > effort, while Core is more internal to Jane Street; they would probably > welcome contributions, but their internal code is naturally their top > priority, and the external release model has been rather sporadic for now. > > > Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye: > >> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little >> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a >> synthesis of all these "standard" library. >> > > After the first OCaml Meeting, there has been some discussion on the Cocan > Wiki, but I think the site is down currently. > > http://le-gall.net/sylvain+violaine/blog/index.php?post/2008/01/30/36-ocamlmeeting-in-paris-debian-summary > > > 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss > >> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big >> appeal. > > > Sylvain Le Gall has been working on a CPAN-like repository for OCaml, using > his "oasis" distribution tool: > http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html > > Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years. > With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore > Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml > code. Of course, there still are a lot of rough edges, but the only way to > go further is that the community (yes, you!) try to use those tools, > popularize them, and also report feedback on what could be improved. > > For a very long time, using OCaml has been a joyful but solitary activity. > If you want a more vibrant community, the only thing to do is to do your > part of the work as you would need the others to do. Set a standard, so that > things that are now rare are taken for granted in the future. Nobody, except > maybe Sylvain, has the devotion to work full-time on the small details that > will improve things in the long run, and this is ok. Yes, writing an oasis > file (or even a META) or contributing an obvious function to Batteries is > tedious and certainly less sexy that a lot of things you're working on. But > this won't happen magically. > > > > > On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Pierre-Alexandre Voye < > ontologiae@gmail.com> wrote: > >> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss >> >>> >>> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit : >>> >>> It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1 >>> dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others, >>> of sucess. >>> Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big >>> problem. >>> >>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little >>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a >>> synthesis of all these "standard" library. >>> >>> >>> Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA. >>> >>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have >>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have >>> more users than a complete alternative. >>> >>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big >>> appeal. >>> >>> >>> I think INRIA, and in particular the Xavier Leroy's team, make what they >> can. Their work isn't to maintain OCaml but mainly to do research. >> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company >> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on >> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's >> team of course. >> >> >> -- >> --------------------- >> Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/ >> > >