[CentOS-devel] RFC: OCaml SIG

[Johnny Hughes]

On 11/19/2014 07:20 AM, Jon Ludlam wrote:
> 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


We might be able to do this as part of the current Virt SIG if everyone
there agrees.

I know that we want to use a newer OCaml for xen on both c6 and c7.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes


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