Skip to content

Compiler Hacking

Jump to bottom Edit New page
Gemma Gordon edited this page Feb 4, 2016 · 18 revisions

##17th February - Pembroke College

It's time for the twelfth Cambridge OCaml compiler-hacking session! We are back at Pembroke College, in the centre of Cambridge.

If you're planning to come along, it'd be helpful if you could indicate interest via Doodle and sign up to the mailing list to receive updates:

Where: N7, Pembroke College, Cambridge CB2 1RF. Head through the entrance on Trumpington Street, and we'll be there at the Porter's Lodge to direct you.

When: 7pm, Wednesday 17th February.

Who: anyone interested in improving OCaml. Knowledge of OCaml programming will obviously be helpful, but prior experience of working on OCaml internals isn't necessary.

What: fixing bugs, implementing new features, learning about OCaml internals

Wiki: https://github.com/ocamllabs/compiler-hacking/wiki

We're defining "compiler" pretty broadly, to include anything that's part of the standard distribution, which means at least the standard library, runtime, tools (ocamldep, ocamllex, ocamlyacc, etc.), camlp4, ocamlbuild, the documentation, and the compiler itself. We'll have suggestions for mini-projects for various levels of experience, but feel free to come along and work on whatever you fancy.

Drinks and finger buffet will be provided.

##30th November - Pembroke College

It's time for the eleventh Cambridge OCaml compiler-hacking session! This time we're heading to central Cambridge, to enjoy all that Pembroke College has to offer.

If you're planning to come along, it'd be helpful if you could indicate interest via Doodle and sign up to the mailing list to receive updates:

Where: Outer Parlour, Pembroke College, Cambridge CB2 1RF. Head through the entrance on Trumpington Street, and we'll be there at the Porter's Lodge to direct you.

When: 6pm, Monday 30th November

Who: anyone interested in improving OCaml. Knowledge of OCaml programming will obviously be helpful, but prior experience of working on OCaml internals isn't necessary.

What: fixing bugs, implementing new features, learning about OCaml internals

Wiki: https://github.com/ocamllabs/compiler-hacking/wiki

We're defining "compiler" pretty broadly, to include anything that's part of the standard distribution, which means at least the standard library, runtime, tools (ocamldep, ocamllex, ocamlyacc, etc.), camlp4, ocamlbuild, the documentation, and the compiler itself. We'll have suggestions for mini-projects for various levels of experience, but feel free to come along and work on whatever you fancy.

Drinks and finger buffet will be provided.

##Write Up

What a success!! We were all able to enjoy the beauty and history of Pembroke College whilst working hard on the compiler. Rest assured - all of those extra cheese scones went to a good home at Jimmy's Shelter :)

We had a range of abilities and familiarity with OCaml this time, and it was a great collaborative group atmosphere.

Beginners

  • Thomas Haggett was finally enticed to the dark side that is OCaml, and contributed support for SmartOS/Illumos. He is by no means a beginner, but new to OCaml.

  • Gemma Gordon pitched in by submitting her first PR to ocaml.org from scratch. Assistance was certainly required (!) but we did come across some holes in the onboarding documentation that could be addressed.

Intermediate/Advanced

flambda

Attempting to type algebraic effects

OPAM security signing infra

  • Hannes continued some testing and patches for a signed repository library, to-be-integrated into opam. This is in sort-of alpha-stage, early testers, comments and feedback welcome (still needs test cases and proper library documentation) at https://github.com/hannesm/conex

Misc

  • David Sheets was working on refactoring the OCaml source pprint to eliminate objects/classes. We think it was compiling before he left...

  • Armael got to work on improving the performance of record functional update.

  • Although 5000 miles away, Runhang helped tracking compiler performance regression and testing flambda against tsdl.

Add a custom footer
Add a custom sidebar
Clone this wiki locally