December 4, 2022

Advent of Code, Datalog, Melange

Hey there! Welcome to edition #2 "what did Antonio do on the Internets this past week?".

The most glaring omission in this edition is probably ChatGPT. I trust everyone has seen enough of it this week, so I won't waste your time providing my uninformed opinion about it.

Do enjoy this issue, and thanks for reading!

OCaml Land

• The Dune team is working on adding a new (include_subdirs qualified) feature that provides "namespacing" of OCaml modules according to the filesystem directories they live in.
  • Check out the PR and provide your input in the OCaml Discourse thread about some pending design questions.
• TJ DeVries of Neovim fame started solving this year's Advent of Code in OCaml.
  • I popped into his streams to help out and we had fun collaborating on the problems.
  • He uploaded a video walking through the first problem, and I've been promised he's going to record more.

"What did you get done this week?"

• I started working on installing and consuming Melange libraries from OPAM!
  • Why is this a big deal?
    • Our goal is to start publishing Melange libraries to OPAM to further integrate Melange within the OCaml ecosystem.
    • I suspect that a large set of existing (!!) OCaml libraries that build with Dune will only need to add (modes :standard melange) to enable Melange compatibility.
      • This is yet another example that showcases that our bet of leaning hard on OCaml compatibility might pay off in a big way.
    • The OPAM repository contains very high quality libraries that I'm personally excited to start compiling to JavaScript through Melange.
• I fixed an annoying bug in eio-ssl
  • SSL sockets now set the O_NONBLOCK flag on their file descriptors, which prevents the OCaml domain from hanging.
  • The fix has also now landed in Piaf, my HTTP client/server library based on EIO
  • In case you've missed it, I covered EIO in more detail in last week's issue

Random

• For all the Nix and NixOS enthusiasts, I found MyNixOS this week.
  • MyNixOS is a search engine for Nix & NixOS examples and reproducible environments. May be handy when you're looking for a certain recipe that others may have contributed!
• Google open sourced Mangle, an extension to Datalog that I'm interested in trying out.
• Last week I listened to the Lex Fridman podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya
  • I was mostly intrigued by his prediction that the marginal cost of energy might go to 0 (3 min clip for the impatient)
  • Question for the dear reader: had you heard this prediction before? What are some books you recommend I read to educate myself on this (baffling to me!) prediction?
• A personal note: I was laid off from Netlify this past week
  • While I'm still thinking about what's next for me, it's unfortunate to have to stop working on Netlify Graph (prev. OneGraph), a project I had been ecstatically following since 2017.
  • It's likely that you subscribed to this newsletter because you're familiar with my recent work. If you know of opportunities in your network that you think I'd like working on, feel free to reach out by replying to this email!