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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · 4d

Unsure whether to be more shocked by the discovery that there will be 10 current/former lay clerks singing at this morning’s mass at Westminster Cathedral (first time for a decade?) or that they’ve completely renovated the 100 year old song school toilets!

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · 16d

Quite an extreme case of rewrite-it-in-Rust… www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Moon is rusting — thanks to ‘wind’ blown all the way from Earth

Lunar minerals generate the rust mineral hematite when bombarded with high-energy oxygen particles, experiments show.

www.nature.com

David Allsopp @dra27.uk · 21d

🤣

David Allsopp @dra27.uk · 23d

Actually, dune package management is then able to stop doing anything special for the compiler - it becomes possible for Dune’s cache to cache the build instead (which was tested with a much earlier build back in March IIRC). So Dune still “builds” the compiler multiple times - but using the cache

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · 24d

Discuss announcement at discuss.ocaml.org/t/17253; “overview” PR at github.com/ocaml/ocaml/...; some additional pontifications at www.dra27.uk/blog/platfor...

Relocatable OCaml

It is my great pleasure, 3 years to the day since I finalised the first full demonstration of it in Ljubljana for the OCaml Workshop in 2022, to announce the general availability of Relocatable OCaml ...

discuss.ocaml.org

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · 24d

3 years since I finalised the demo of it for the OCaml Workshop in Ljubljana, Relocatable OCaml is finally submitted for review! 🥳🍾🎊

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Aug 29

Currently dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s and therefore wishing I’d used fewer ‘i’s and ‘t’s in my code (also, when I did I start handwriting code?? 🤔) #relocatable #ocaml

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Aug 27

Reeling in shock and awe at just how simple and fast live-moving VM storage is in Hyper-V #scarred-by-esxi

David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Aug 17

andymasley.substack.com/p/contra-the... #world-beating

Contra the UK government, please don't delete your old photos and emails to save water

You'd need to delete hundreds of millions of emails to save as much water as fixing your toilet

andymasley.substack.com

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Aug 17

Wonders how much water Apple could save each year by having Apple Mail offer to reduce the size of photos being emailed from an iPad in the same way as it does on an iPhone? 🤔🧐🤫

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Aug 15

Remembering the grandfather who could not forgive so that hopefully we might learn from it #VJ80

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Aug 12

“I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this particular part of Hertfordshire, but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.”

Good old Oscar 🤣

David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Aug 4

Congratulations to Apple for anticlimax of the month with Apple “Intelligence”. In a metaphor for the age, seems all the time has been spent on the animations and hype and not a lot on it actually doing anything 🤷🏻‍♂️ #unabletosummarisethismessage

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Reposted by David Allsopp

Yaron Minsky @yminsky.bsky.social · Jul 21

Yet another small OCaml/OxCaml diff has been squished! Polymorphic parameters has just gotten merged upstream:

github.com/ocaml/ocaml/...

There's more to go (include functor, for example: github.com/ocaml/RFCs/p...), but it's nice to see more progress in this space.

Polymorphic Parameters by voodoos · Pull Request #13806 · ocaml/ocaml

This upstreaming PR adds the possibility to have function parameters with polymorphic types in the language. This work was originally done by @lpw25 in Jane Street's fork of the compiler with e...

github.com

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jul 20

Working on Windows, too... 16 seconds verses 4 minutes.

Terminal screenshot showing an existing opam switch being cloned in under 20 seconds on Windows, with the new compiler reporting its new location

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jul 20

Testing opam packages for Relocatable OCaml which actually take advantage of it. Creating a new switch using the same version as one you've already built in another switch now takes 5 seconds, rather than 2 minutes (cloning the compiler itself takes just 100ms of that 5 seconds!)

Terminal screenshot showing an existing opam switch being cloned in under 5 seconds on Linux, with the new compiler reporting its new location

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jul 17

Is it late enough in the day to be allowed to acknowledge the #oxcaml themed Wordle?

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jul 2

Some very strong resonances for me (with thanks to @chshersh.com for drawing into my view over on X…)

Keynote: Rethinking our Adoption Strategy - Evan Czaplicki | Lambda Days 2025

YouTube video by Code Sync

youtube.com

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jul 1

Childishly amused that the journey from Cambridge to Newcastle begins with a train to Liverpool #weregoingthewrongway

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Reposted by David Allsopp

Yaron Minsky @yminsky.bsky.social · Jun 13

I'm pleased to announce OxCaml!

OxCaml is Jane Street's branch of OCaml. We've given it a new name and a snazzy logo, and done a bunch of work to make it easy for people to try.

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jun 13

Native apps, sadly!

David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jun 2

I was then wondering if there may be some trickery/annotion which would allow it to realise that the old ref cell is now consumed and the new one is the same, so reuse it (doesn’t the uniqueness mean we can’t observe the physical address either?)

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jun 2

Nice! Magic grates slightly - maybe show it in two stages… keep using a fresh cell each time, but use modes to eliminate the need for the runtime check and exception, _then_ use magic to eliminate the copy? Now wondering what might be in the pipeline that allows the compiler to infer that magic? 🤔

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David Allsopp @dra27.uk · Jun 1

1994 (and earlier): select text in one “app”, copy, paste to another “app”
2025: select text in one app, copy, switch to other app and discover they’ve disabled paste on the input fields. Return to other app. Write information on piece of paper. Type into other app.
#progress #modern

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