dev meeting 2025 06 11 - ocaml/dune GitHub Wiki

Agenda

  • release 3.19.1 (@Alizter)

  • time to deprecate the monorepo benchmark (Steve, who won't be present but please discuss this anyway ;) )

    • nobody is maintaining it, Steve is the only one who knows how to maintain it (though there are docs on the Tarides internal wiki)
    • originally introduced so we could benchmark dune on a large monorepo so Jane Street could get a sense for if it was fast enough for them to adopt
    • this adoption has now taken place (afaik)
    • ostensibly the benchmark is also there to detect regressions in upstream dune, but Jane Street seems to have forked dune in the meantime for the purposes of oxcaml

  • OxCaml extension and pform (@maiste)

    • For OxCaml, I tried to add an extension to guard the variable %{oxcaml_supported} but it creates a dependency loop with Pform
    • Two options:
      • Manually register the oxcaml with a ref (Found it ugly)
      • Instead of a variable create a new field with_oxcaml_supported.

Meeting notes

Attendees: @maiste @rgrinberg @shym @Alizter @rikusilvola @aguluman @Leonidas-from-XIV

Release 3.19.1 (@Alizter)

  • Ali had worked on improving the way programs are launched, but it had lead to a regression
  • Reverted back to the old way
  • It was released earlier this morning to opam-repository
  • CI was stuck because it could only use released versions, @maiste has created two PRs to enable CI to use the unreleased dev-version
  • We should otherwise stick to our usual release cadence
  • There are some issues setting up a clean switch
    • But it seems developing on OCaml 5.3.0 works perfectly fine aside from some warnings about alert in the bootstrap process

Obsolete monorepo benchmark (@gridbugs)

  • Only maintained by @gridbugs
  • Made for adoption within Jane Street
  • Jane Street does not need it any more
  • It takes a long time to build
  • It can be removed
  • This is the one benchmark which takes a really long time, the other benchmarks are still useful

OxCaml support flag (@maiste)

  • There should be a possibility to determine whether building oxcaml is suported
  • It can be a pform but should be guarded behind the oxcaml extension
  • But determining whether to support it or not causes a circular dependency
  • set_decoding_environment can be used to register extensions
  • We have had this situation before, Melange might be doing something similar, Coq definitely does, the appraoch can be copied
  • It's stored in an universal map, shouldn't cause any circular dependencies