David Allsopp
@dra27.uk
Cambridge-based, London-working software engineer; sometime classical singer. @dra27 in many places, including GitHub; OCaml maintainer; opam maintainer; Windows {apolog,evangel}ist
Claude Code has committed in trunk OCaml! With great power comes great responsibility, and all that...
January 26, 2026 at 7:47 AM
Claude Code has committed in trunk OCaml! With great power comes great responsibility, and all that...
Fantastic special series of episodes of @timharford.ft.com and co’s More or Less occupying the BBC Radio 4 9am slot *every day* this week
January 7, 2026 at 12:14 PM
Fantastic special series of episodes of @timharford.ft.com and co’s More or Less occupying the BBC Radio 4 9am slot *every day* this week
I was implicitly referred to as a “hoary greybeard” the other day… my son just innocently asked how long I’ve worked on/in OCaml and I realised the answer is half my life 👴🏻 #old #greybeard
January 4, 2026 at 10:32 AM
I was implicitly referred to as a “hoary greybeard” the other day… my son just innocently asked how long I’ve worked on/in OCaml and I realised the answer is half my life 👴🏻 #old #greybeard
Haven’t had to use a paper train ticket in a looong time, and was somewhat bemused to see the machine list that it would be printing two seat reservations. I am duly sat in my first non-specific seat of the day. Nice paper-saving there, @greateranglia.bsky.social!
November 30, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Haven’t had to use a paper train ticket in a looong time, and was somewhat bemused to see the machine list that it would be printing two seat reservations. I am duly sat in my first non-specific seat of the day. Nice paper-saving there, @greateranglia.bsky.social!
There are some minor corrections to be made in each branch, but Relocatable OCaml has passed its defence!
November 25, 2025 at 5:20 PM
There are some minor corrections to be made in each branch, but Relocatable OCaml has passed its defence!
Being British, I’m of course able to read this both negatively and positively 🫢 news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585...
Opam on Windows is a masterpiece of engineering | Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com
November 8, 2025 at 11:03 AM
Being British, I’m of course able to read this both negatively and positively 🫢 news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585...
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!
October 5, 2025 at 9:44 AM
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!
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
September 23, 2025 at 7:06 AM
Quite an extreme case of rewrite-it-in-Rust… www.nature.com/articles/d41...
3 years since I finalised the demo of it for the OCaml Workshop in Ljubljana, Relocatable OCaml is finally submitted for review! 🥳🍾🎊
September 15, 2025 at 11:45 AM
3 years since I finalised the demo of it for the OCaml Workshop in Ljubljana, Relocatable OCaml is finally submitted for review! 🥳🍾🎊
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
August 29, 2025 at 9:53 AM
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
Reeling in shock and awe at just how simple and fast live-moving VM storage is in Hyper-V #scarred-by-esxi
August 27, 2025 at 6:59 AM
Reeling in shock and awe at just how simple and fast live-moving VM storage is in Hyper-V #scarred-by-esxi
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? 🤔🧐🤫
August 17, 2025 at 9:22 AM
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? 🤔🧐🤫
“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 🤣
Good old Oscar 🤣
August 12, 2025 at 10:25 PM
“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 🤣
Good old Oscar 🤣
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
August 4, 2025 at 7:46 AM
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
Reposted by David Allsopp
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.
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
July 21, 2025 at 5:23 PM
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.
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.
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!)
July 20, 2025 at 3:11 PM
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!)
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
July 2, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Some very strong resonances for me (with thanks to @chshersh.com for drawing into my view over on X…)
Childishly amused that the journey from Cambridge to Newcastle begins with a train to Liverpool #weregoingthewrongway
July 1, 2025 at 7:47 AM
Childishly amused that the journey from Cambridge to Newcastle begins with a train to Liverpool #weregoingthewrongway
Reposted by David Allsopp
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.
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.
June 13, 2025 at 2:14 PM
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.
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.
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
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
June 1, 2025 at 1:10 PM