[Caml-list] [ANN] Macaque 0.6

[Caml-list] [ANN] Macaque 0.6

[Gabriel Scherer]

Macaque is the result of a student project aiming to develop a
type-safe and composable way to interact with SQL databases from
OCaml. We propose a form of "comprehension syntax" that allow to
modularily create queries in a strongly-typed and relatively
principled way.

## Release 0.6

After a few years of mild continuous development, people have
requested at several occasions that release be made. I therefore tag
the current state of Macaque as "0.6".

You can get an archive from the forge:
  https://forge.ocamlcore.org/frs/download.php/1027/macaque-0.6.tar.gz

You can also get the new version from darcs:
  darcs get --tag 0.6 http://forge.ocamlcore.org/anonscm/darcs/macaque/macaque

Thanks to everyone I have interacted with during this development;
thanks to Vincent Balat and Anastasia Gornostaeva for their feedback.
Thanks in particular to Jacques-Pascal Deplaix for his frequent
feedback and occasional suggestions and contributions.


## More Details

Macaque was initially developed at the PPS lab in Paris, under the
supervision of Jérôme Vouillon. The current development mode could be
described as "coinductive": things get done in reaction to user
requests or needs.

The technical limitations of Macaque are the following:

- It only support PostGreSQL (from lack of time to develop
  other backends).

- Each feature of the SQL language must be considered and added
separately, with the right typing; this aspect makes it structurally
less complete than direct (but less composable) embedding of full SQL
queries like the parent project PG'OCaml does, so the subset of SQL
supported by Macaque is smaller -- but you can help extending it!

  http://pgocaml.forge.ocamlcore.org/

- You have to learn the comprehension-like syntax used by Macaque (it
should be possible to write a frontend using the SQL syntax, but this
hasn't been done yet).

- The documentation *does* exist, but is not very good. It's the
README that you can see at
    http://darcs.ocamlcore.org/repos/macaque/README
  and patches to improve it are welcome

The version number below 1.0 highlights that Macaque is still an
evolving project with no strong production-readiness guarantees, yet a
number substantially higher than 0.1 indicates that it has seen
several users and probably fixed the most glaring issues with the
current feature set.

(I would have initially chosen 0.3 or 0.7 as a version number. Like
most people. '6' is an oft-overlooked number, a factorial and the
product of the two first prime numbers. Go 6 and 8!)