“Daddy, your code is amazing” - inspiring future generations (in Scratch 🫣🤫🤐)
David Allsopp
@dra27.uk
Cambridge-based, London-working software engineer; sometime classical singer. @dra27 in many places, including GitHub; OCaml maintainer; opam maintainer; Windows {apolog,evangel}ist
Hopelessly nerd-sniped by github.com/ocaml/ocaml/... … continuing a fine Jane Street tradition of surfacing kernel bugs using OCaml - just not in our usual kernel!
OCaml 5.5.0 build failure on Windows · Issue #14871 · ocaml/ocaml
The attempt to upgrade my Windows OCaml installation to 5.5.0 keeps failing, please see the following log. The path C:\\Users\\me\\AppData\\Local\\opam\\default\\lib\\toplevel:stdlib.cmi that it tr...
github.com
Doing some clearing out - do these belong in recycling… or in a museum? 😂🤔
Seeing the news of Moltbook’s “acquisition” is somehow making me want to (re-)watch Memento 🤔
_Great_ Northern; _Great_er Anglia; _Great_ Western Railway; Thames_link_ … all ironies of naming 🤔
Claude Code has committed in trunk OCaml! With great power comes great responsibility, and all that...
Fantastic special series of episodes of @timharford.ft.com and co’s More or Less occupying the BBC Radio 4 9am slot *every day* this week
I was implicitly referred to as a “hoary greybeard” the other day… my son just innocently asked how long I’ve worked on/in OCaml and I realised the answer is half my life 👴🏻 #old #greybeard
Haven’t had to use a paper train ticket in a looong time, and was somewhat bemused to see the machine list that it would be printing two seat reservations. I am duly sat in my first non-specific seat of the day. Nice paper-saving there, @greateranglia.bsky.social!
Aaaand, breathe again… 😮💨 github.com/ocaml/ocaml/...
Relocatable OCaml - `--with-relative-libdir` by dra27 · Pull Request #14244 · ocaml/ocaml
This is the second of three PRs which implement Relocatable OCaml as proposed in ocaml/RFCs#53. The series of changes in this PR combine to allow the absolute location of the Standard Library (e.g....
github.com
There are some minor corrections to be made in each branch, but Relocatable OCaml has passed its defence!
Being British, I’m of course able to read this both negatively and positively 🫢 news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585...
Opam on Windows is a masterpiece of engineering | Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com
Unsure whether to be more shocked by the discovery that there will be 10 current/former lay clerks singing at this morning’s mass at Westminster Cathedral (first time for a decade?) or that they’ve completely renovated the 100 year old song school toilets!
3 years since I finalised the demo of it for the OCaml Workshop in Ljubljana, Relocatable OCaml is finally submitted for review! 🥳🍾🎊
Currently dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s and therefore wishing I’d used fewer ‘i’s and ‘t’s in my code (also, when I did I start handwriting code?? 🤔) #relocatable #ocaml
Reeling in shock and awe at just how simple and fast live-moving VM storage is in Hyper-V #scarred-by-esxi
Wonders how much water Apple could save each year by having Apple Mail offer to reduce the size of photos being emailed from an iPad in the same way as it does on an iPhone? 🤔🧐🤫
Remembering the grandfather who could not forgive so that hopefully we might learn from it #VJ80
“I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this particular part of Hertfordshire, but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.” Good old Oscar 🤣
Congratulations to Apple for anticlimax of the month with Apple “Intelligence”. In a metaphor for the age, seems all the time has been spent on the animations and hype and not a lot on it actually doing anything 🤷🏻♂️ #unabletosummarisethismessage
Yet another small OCaml/OxCaml diff has been squished! Polymorphic parameters has just gotten merged upstream: github.com/ocaml/ocaml/... There's more to go (include functor, for example: github.com/ocaml/RFCs/p...), but it's nice to see more progress in this space.
Polymorphic Parameters by voodoos · Pull Request #13806 · ocaml/ocaml
This upstreaming PR adds the possibility to have function parameters with polymorphic types in the language. This work was originally done by @lpw25 in Jane Street's fork of the compiler with e...
github.com
Testing opam packages for Relocatable OCaml which actually take advantage of it. Creating a new switch using the same version as one you've already built in another switch now takes 5 seconds, rather than 2 minutes (cloning the compiler itself takes just 100ms of that 5 seconds!)
Is it late enough in the day to be allowed to acknowledge the #oxcaml themed Wordle?
Some very strong resonances for me (with thanks to @chshersh.com for drawing into my view over on X…)
Keynote: Rethinking our Adoption Strategy - Evan Czaplicki | Lambda Days 2025
YouTube video by Code Sync
youtube.com
Childishly amused that the journey from Cambridge to Newcastle begins with a train to Liverpool #weregoingthewrongway
I'm pleased to announce OxCaml! OxCaml is Jane Street's branch of OCaml. We've given it a new name and a snazzy logo, and done a bunch of work to make it easy for people to try.