Re: [MirageOS-devel] OCaml newbie looking to learn and contribute

[Hannes Mehnert <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gabriel,

On 02/11/2016 19:28, Gabriel Jaldon wrote:
> I'm Gabriel and I'm new to OCaml. I have been learning it the past few
> months through the OCaml course at https://www.fun-mooc.fr and the Real
> World OCaml book (halfway done with both). I'm a web developer by
> profession and currently mostly use Elixir (a functional language), Python
> and Javascript at work.
> 
> OCaml is interesting to me since it's an ML-type language I could do
> systems programming with. I tried Haskell too but I did not like how it was
> lazy by default, made you go through hoops to do side-effects, and the
> convention of chaining function calls with `$` and `.`.

Great to hear!

> A few days ago I was looking for OCaml open-source projects and was pleased
> to rediscover MirageOS. I didn't really understand what Unikernels were
> then even though I've encountered the term several times before. Lean,
> custom OSes with just the functionality my application needs sounds
> promising. Does this mean that Unikernels/LibOSes can potentially replace
> traditional OSes in production? I don't fully appreciate/understand how it
> works or its applications but am eager to learn more.
> 
> Regarding contributions, I'm interested in contributing to ocaml-git or
> ocaml-cohttp initially but am open to start with anything you might
> suggest. Would like to take on something simple for a start.

One of the projects I'd really like to use would be a mirage-dashboard
(http://canopy.mirage.io/Projects/dashboard) - the aim is to provide a
quick overview of the enormous amount of libraries in the MirageOS
project together with activity (last commit, last issue, amount of open
issues, number of commits since last release), since it is really hard
to track them at the moment.

Once we have an overview, we should also add tags to the opam files to
categorise our libraries (e.g. network protocol, block device, ...) and
get a nice overview what we have and what we still need.

If you feel like, there's already some code by Joel (at
https://github.com/rudenoise/mirage-dashboard), and I'm sure help to get
this up and running is appreciated.


hannes

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