2021-11-10 –, Room 2
OPAM is the de facto standard package manager for the OCaml programming language. As a frequent contributor to its repository, I present an overview of its evolution, features, and recent ecosystem projects such as automated lower bounds checking, as well as my own experience with it.
OCaml was relatively late to receive a language-specific package manager and OPAM brought a big change to the ecosystem. The fact that it allows managing compiler installations together with packages and that OPAM can be installed before the compiler was a rather novel feature at the time. The talk is focused on the following topics:
- Features and packaging workflows.
- Positive and negative effects of centralization (with specific examples)
- Recent effort on automated lower bounds checking
- Evolution, transition to OPAM 2.0 and how it was managed
- Ecosystem challenges (Windows support, cross-compilation...)
- My personal experience with OPAM and the ecosystem as a long-term contributor
Co-founder and maintainer of VyOS (vyos.net), functional programming enthusiast, frequent contributor to the OCaml ecosystem.