Learning Functional Reactive Programming

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is a programming technique that I think hasn’t filtered down to the level of workaday programmers (like myself) but is well-regarded in the academic community.
Upside is that it could make writing Gtk and web applications much simpler.
Downside is that no one from the academic world has ever managed to explain FRP [...]

Change OCaml Graphics module to use modern X fonts

Before and after. The character spacing is all wrong because I’m just drawing each character separately and incrementing the X position by the width of the character. If you draw whole strings instead then they will be kerned properly.
Bug report and patch.

XML or S-expressions?

I was writing a little program to track monthly outgoings. “Only” £30/month for internet access or whatever can quickly add up …
But what format should I save the data in? XML is heavyweight and redundant compared to S-expressions, compare:

<outgoing rate=”monthly”>
<price>30.</price>
<name>Internet</name>
</outgoing>

(outgoing
(rate monthly)
(price 30.)
(name “Internet”))

(Update: [...]

OCaml Users Meeting, April 2010

Sylvain has just announced that the next OCaml Meeting will be on 16th or 17th April 2010 in Paris, France.
Here are photos from the last meeting which was a great success.

OCaml PDF editor

A shout out to Brit John Whitington who runs a company that writes a (proprietary) PDF editor written in OCaml with a rather nice user interface as you can see.

OCaml autoconf macros 1.1

_Zack did all the work for the new release of the autoconf macros to support OCaml projects.
There’s a build for Fedora already and you can read the manual page here.
Does anyone know a good way to format man pages to HTML, but without making them all sucky and proportional with randomly sized headers? I’d [...]

OCaml internals part 5: Garbage collection

In part 1 and part 2 I talked about values and blocks, and in part 3 and part 4 I discussed where those are stored in the OCaml heap.
In this part I want to talk about garbage collection, but actually not about how the heap is scanned or colouring algorithms because there are much better [...]

OCaml internals part 3: The minor heap

In part 1 we learned about values and in part 2 we learned about blocks. Values and blocks are the toolkit used to make every OCaml type. But where do OCaml blocks live? In this part we’ll start to look at the OCaml heap.
Most OCaml blocks are created in the minor (or [...]

OCaml internals part 2: Strings and other types

In part 1 we saw how integers and some integer-like things are represented at runtime in OCaml.
Objects which are large or more complex than simple integers are stored in OCaml blocks. An OCaml block consists of a header followed by an array of words. Word in this context means a 4 or 8 [...]

A beginners guide to OCaml internals

In this 6 part series, I’m going to introduce the internals of the OCaml programming language (tutorial and other references here). This isn’t going to be very comprehensive or in-depth. It’s more of a digest of the readily available information that I found by reading the manual, header files, and some of the compiler [...]