1 Deploying a zero allocation OxCaml webserver
I decided to spend this week on as much focussed hacking as I could, and in particular finished up switching my website to a new webserver in OxCaml. This attracted a lot of attention, so I spent a surprising amount of time answering questions on the socials about it! If you're reading this site, then it also works...
One funny thing that happened right after deploying it was that I noticed tens of thousands of concurrent connections opened. It turns out that Moltbook had a sub-molt used by agents that track Hackernews somehow, and a bunch of them had decided to mine my website for ... something. The switch to agents dominating the Internet are arriving rapidly!
The actual development of httpz is happening in a new oxcaml monorepo I've opened. I've not abandoned my older way of publishing to opam as well, but Jon Ludlam and Thomas Gazagnaire are refining that approach. When coding in OxCaml, I need to fork almost every library, so a monorepo is the only way to go!
On a more human note, it was delightful to see Jon Sterling discuss his Research Group Manual which codifies many of the reasons why I started a blogging tradition here in my own group.
2 OCaml
In the land of OCaml, I proposed dropping the minimum supported version of opam to general support. The general drag of maintenance of the CI infrastructure in my group is becoming a problem; just moving to opam 2.5 or debugging arm64 issues was a giant amount of work for Mark, so we have to keep on top of deprecating old things somehow. On the other hand, we're also extending some cool uses of Capnp capabilities throughout the infrastructure, which makes CLI usage of all these services easier and easier.
I also took the opportunity to upload all of the OCaml workshop talks to <watch.ocaml.org>, so they're available for your browsing pleasure.
I caught up with Thomas Leonard and Patrick Ferris to discuss what to do about the number of Eio issues piling up. We're all generally happy with how stable and usable it is (I'm using it everywhere), but we'll get together after our current set of projects to do a collective push to merge our branches together. I'm pretty happy with this model of development: get some experience using it, and then make a bunch of changes after "learning by doing".
3 FOSDEM
Congratulations also to Ryan Gibb for a tremendous showing at FOSDEM, delivering three talks to packed rooms! They're all online to watch and I want to particularly highlight how much I enjoyed his package management calculus one. We're working on getting this submitted to a PL conference next!
The live streaming support from FOSDEM was fantastic this year and I got to see everything live while also sitting in a chilly picnic in Cambridge over the weekend.
4 Next week
Some fun links:
- Simulating falling autumn leaves in Blender is a lovely post by Nick Ludlam that I want to follow through.
- Ray Tracer Performance improvements by Michael Dales continues his inevitable journey to OxCaml as he builds his OCaml raytracer.
- Tom Blomfield notes how funny it is that Cambridge handwritten exams are now the best way to assess.