[cwn] Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News

[Alan Schmitt]

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of September 17 to 24, 2013.

1) OCaml on Android
2) OCaml release 4.01.0
3) OCaml vs Ada and/or GUI options
4) Beta release of OPAM 1.1.0
5) Ocaml on an embedded arm system (no linux)
6) Call for Talks - Open World Forum / OSDC
7) SIunits 0.1
8) ocaml interface to berkeley db?
9) Other Caml News

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1) OCaml on Android
Archive: <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2013-09/msg00257.html>
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** Jon Harrop asked and Anil Madhavapeddy replied:

> What is the status of OCaml on Android? Have any Android apps been written
> in OCaml?

There's a GitHub OPAM repository here:
<https://github.com/vouillon/opam-android-repository>

and I've just ordered myself my first Android device, as Mirage has just been
ported over to it a few days ago in UNIX mode:
<https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/cl-mirage/2013-September/msg00062.html>

I haven't tried it myself yet, but intend to once my physical device shows
up. Googling reveals a few applications built using it already, but I have
no idea how substantial they are.
      
** Thomas Sibut-Pinote also replied:

I'm not sure if this anwers your question, but someone wrote an Ocaml
toplevel for Android:
<http://vernoux.fr/2011/11/11/ocaml-toplevel-for-android/>
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.vernoux.ocaml>
      
** Kristopher Micinski  said and Ivan Gotovchits suggested:

> The basic problem with running OCaml on Android is that pretty much
> everything (minus a few system services / daemons, for example) runs
> inside a Dalvik VM.  Everything that is a "real app" thus uses the
> facilities of the SDK to interact with the underlying
> system.  (Various services such as internet can be opened via a raw
> socket, and are protected via lower level system modifications.)

And what about OCaml-Java [1]. Will it be possible to use it with
dalvik?

[1] <http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/preview/>
      
** Kristopher Micinski then said and Xavier Clerc added:

> With a little bit of hacking it'd probably work, but I'm not sure of the
> status of ocaml-java and haven't looked into the implementation details.
> Since ocaml-java outputs class files (afaik) you'd have to sort of hack the
> android build pipeline yourself, but that wouldn't be the hard part: all
> the tools are there. The harder part is that the Android SDK is very Java
> oriented, and it just feels awkward as hell to use in OCaml even if you
> were to write a thin wrapper around the SDK.

In theory, you are right that it wouldn't be hard.
In practice, the problem is that OCaml-Java emits classes
for Java 1.7 while (to the best of my knowledge) Android
only accepts Java 1.6 classes. As far as I know, there is no
other pending problem.