[CentOS-devel] RFC: OCaml SIG

[Jon Ludlam]

Hi all,

I'd like to propose a new SIG for the OCaml language.

OCaml is an industrial strength programming language supporting functional, imperative and object-oriented styles. It has in recent years seen a marked increase in development activity, particularly in the compiler itself [1], core libraries [2] and developer tools [3]. Many of these newer libraries and features are already dependencies of a number of large upstream projects [4].

The version of OCaml in CentOS 6 is quite old (3.11.2, released in Jan 2010), and even that in CentOS 7 is fairly old (4.00.1, released in October 2012). I see the OCaml SIG providing the current stable compiler (4.02.1 at time of writing), and a selection of useful libraries and developer tools. This could then be used as a basis for other applications or SIGs to build upon - for example, it would make CentOS a good platform for building Unikernels [5] and it would be helpful in getting the Xapi Project suite of daemons [4] into one of the virtualisation/cloud SIGs. We actually already have a number of specs that are built for CentOS 6 which could make a good starting point [6].

A number of people have already agreed that they are interested and may be able to help (all CC'd):

>From OCaml Labs (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/ocamllabs/):
- Anil Madhavapeddy
- Thomas Gazagnaire

>From Jane Street (https://www.janestreet.com/):
- Yaron Minsky
- Dominick LoBraico

>From Citrix (https://www.citrix.com/):
- Me
- Euan Harris

>From OCamlPro (http://www.ocamlpro.com/):
- Louis Gesbert

Comments?

Jon

[1] GADTs, record disambiguation, PPX extensions, immutable strings, etc.
[2] ocaml-ctypes, Jane Street Core, the openmirage.org suite of libraries, etc.
[3] opam, merlin, utop, etc.
[4] https://github.com/xapi-project and http://ocsigen.org/
[5] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628
[6] https://github.com/xenserver/buildroot