April 1, 2023

#4 - 1st of 2023, Melange update, cross-compilation!

Welcome to edition #4 of my newsletter!

As you can tell, I’ve been slacking off on this newsletter.

This has been a busy few months! In January, I was mostly busy meeting folks and interviewing for my next role. February and March, I was mostly working on getting Melange ready for v1. I’ll share more about these 2 topics in a future update :-)

In the meantime, I wanted to break the silence and share a few cool things I’ve been working on recently. In no particular order:

• The Melange + Dune integration is coming along very nicely. We’re almost ready to start working on documenting it and releasing it more widely.
  • Please get in touch if you’re interested in trying out Melange + Dune and don’t know where to start!
• Over the past couple weeks, I’ve also gotten interested in improving cross-compilation in dune
  • More specifically, I fixed issues related to installing cross-compiled libraries, finding PPX dependencies in the build/host context, looking for the host context findlib.conf and resolving ppx_runtime_libraries in the target context
  • All these improvements allowed me to simplify my OCaml-focused nix-overlays quite a bit: check the PR!
• I’ve been interested in AWS Lambda again, and I ported my AWS Lambda custom runtime to OCaml 5 and EIO
  • I’ve been thinking about how to deploy Melange applications to platforms like Vercel
    • The biggest challenge here is that Melange projects need an entire OCaml toolchain installation, and Vercel expects to just run a package.json script
    • I stumbled upon Vercel’s Build Output API recently, which would allow Melange projects to build in e.g. GitHub Actions and call vercel --prebuilt to deploy a directory structure that Vercel expects according to the Build Output API
    • This sounds fairly promising, and I’ve started writing a small build system to orchestrate builds according to the Build Output API. I’ll be sharing more on this soon!

Thanks for reading this very delayed update, and stay tuned for the next one. Happy hacking!