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The other day I wrote about my experience to set up the build system for a simple library. However, since parmap includes only two simple stubs to syscall I didn't have the chance to talk how to convince ocamlbuild to build stubs that depend on an external dynamic library.

I'm sure, facing this problem you had a look at this example : http://brion.inria.fr/gallium/index.php/Ocamlbuild_example_with_C_stubs

Despite providing all elements, the page is a bit scars of details and explanations (at least for me...).

Today I struggled once again to build a simple library with ocamlbuild, so once for all I decided to write something about it. I'm sure next time, googling for an answer I'll find this post and shake my head in despair :)

The library in question is parmap written by Roberto Di Cosmo to speed up computations on modern multi processors computers. We want to build everything: cma, cmxa and cmxs. Moreover, we want to build a shared library that contains stubs for a couple of bindings to C functions.

I've just released the new version of ocaml-buddy, my ocaml bindings to the buddy BDD c library. Thanks to a fruitful interaction with Jimmy Thomson, I've fixed a couple of memory leaks and cleaned up the code a bit.

grab it when is still hot : https://github.com/abate/ocaml-buddy/tree/0.5

comments a testers are welcome. A debian package is on the way

Thanks to Ralf's work, dose3 has been just accepted in debian experimental !!!

A simple module to parse a uri (well, a small subset of the RFC 3986). The Ocamlnet library contains a better implementation, but it also comes with a lot of dependencies...

Grab it, use it, change it, give it away but remember me :) ...

Lately I've been concerned about the performances of dose3. Soon we will have a package in the official debian archive (containing the new distcheck) and we also plan to use dose3 as foundation of an upcoming apt-get future (external solvers !). This week I tackled a couple of problems.

First I wanted to understand the poor performances of my parser for the debian Packages format. The parser itself (written by J. Voullion for dose2) is a home brewed parser, it uses a Str based tokenizer and it is pretty efficient.

This is just a quicky to start off the day. I often write fatal error message using a combination of Printf.eprintf ;; exit 1 ;; failwith ;; assert false ;; etc ...

Well ... it seems that planet ocaml is faster then light to index new pages... I often start editing one story to publish it few days later to avoid stupid mistakes. This time I published the page by accident and I think it stayed published for less then two minutes... This is the final versions ...

Today i did a small audit on my code to check which are the functions that are often used and can slow down my code. One in particular took my attention, ExtLib.List.unique . This function (below) takes quadratic time on the length of the input list.

Often, when I change something in my project, I wonder if my modifications had any impact on other modules. On the one hand there is correctness. If I change something I want to be confident that I didn't break anything else in a dependent part of the code. In order to alleviate this problem, I often use a battery of unit tests that I ran before committing my changes. This does not give me a proof that I didn't break anything, but at least some level of confidence that if I broke something, this is not something I thought of before...

When developing ocaml applications I often need to load a bunch of libraries in my toplevel to test a small function. This can be a tedious task when you have a complex project and a lot of libraries installed in your system.