Connecting with the OCaml ecosystem
As announced here before, we received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support contributions from experts that want to help increase the coverage of the Software Heritage archive. After a first subgrant awarded to Cottage Labs, a second one awarded to Stefan Sperling, and a third awarded to Octobus, today we are thrilled to announce that a fourth subgrant has been awarded to OCamlPro, that will help increase the coverage of the Software Heritage by integrating it with the OCaml ecosystem.
The OCaml programming language is well known for its powerful type system backed up by a very efficient implementation. It keeps gaining traction traction, with adoption in industry, particularly in finance, security and safety, and in academia, with OCaml courses on the rise in Computer Science education. It is used in the development of many high profile research projects, from the award winning Coq proof assistant, to the Astree static analyzer, the Alt-Ergo SMT solver and the SynDEX CAD software. It is also used in industrial production software such as Facebook Messenger and the Tezos blockchain. Opam is the established package manager for OCaml, incorporates advanced dependency solving technology, and the official Opam repository contains over 3000 packages.
OCamlPro is a company founded in 2011, with the mission to help industrial users benefit from state-of-the-art programming languages like OCaml and Rust, and an extensive expertise in formal methods. It has been instrumental in the development of the Opam package manager and maintains it actively. OCamlPro will develop a lister for the Opam repository, and any missing loader for ingesting the corresponding source code. It will also integrate in Opam support for falling back onto the Software Heritage archive in case the source code cannot be found in its original location, leveraging the SWHID identifiers.
You too can contribute to Software Heritage’s mission! If you want to get involved just fill this simple form to start the process!