Real World OCaml v2
This is the source code for the Real World OCaml 2nd edition, which is still a work in progress. The original edition was written by Yaron Minsky, Anil Madhavapeddy and Jason Hickey, and the revised edition is being led by Yaron Minsky and Anil Madhavapeddy. There have been significant contributions to the revised tooling from Ashish Agarwal, Jeremy Yallop, Frederic Bour, and Sander Spies.
An online snapshot of the development book is available from https://dev.realworldocaml.org. There is a Feedback pane on each chapter which leads to a dedicated section on the OCaml discussion forum where you can register broader feedback. More specific issues such as typos can be reported on the issue tracker.
Repository layout
Each chapter of the book sits in a separate subfolder of the book/
directory. The README.md file contains the text of the chapter,
written in markdown. Each OCaml or shell code block in the chapter is
validated using mdx. The more
complex and structured examples live in an examples/ sub folder and
mdx is used to keep the examples and the chapter's code block in sync.
The bin/ folder contains the OCaml scripts used to generate the books HTML
and PDF versions.
All of the code and examples are built using OCaml 4.09.0.
Building
Here are the commands to build the website:
Installing Dependencies
You can install system dependencies by running:
make depext
All OCaml dependencies are vendored in the duniverse/ directory except
for the dune build system itself. It's preferable to use an empty opam switch
with only dune installed to avoid conflicts between the opam and local
libraries. To set up your RWO development environment you can run:
opam switch create rwo 4.13.1
opam install dune=3.0.2
Generating the HTML
To generate the HTML pages:
make
The HTML pages are created in _build/default/static/.
Open _build/default/static/index.html to start browsing the
freshly built version of the book.
WIP Chapters
It is possible to mark a chapter as WIP so that it won't be included in the main
website or PDF. To do so, you can wrap your chapter in a
(wip <chapter-folder>) in the table of content file, book/toc.scm, e.g.:
You can run dune build @site-wip or dune build @pdf-wip to generate the
website or PDF versions of the book including all WIP chapters. You can find
them respectivey in _build/default/static-wip/index.html and
_build/default/static-wip/book.pdf.
Once the chapter is ready, you can simply replace (wip <chapter-folder>) with
<chapter-folder> in book/toc.scm.
Testing the code examples
It is possible to automatically test that
the the code examples files work fine. To check that shell
scripts and .ml files do what they are expected:
make test
This will run all the tests in "determinitic mode", which is suitable for the CI and it will display the diff between what is expected and what is produced.
To accept the changes:
make promote
Testing non-deterministic examples
A few code examples are not deterministic: for instance benchmarks. In this case, there is a specific dune profile to use:
dune runtest --profile non-deterministic ...
To accept the changes:
make promote
Standalone examples
Examples in each chapter's examples/ folder are split between
correct/ and erroneous/. Each individual example is a valid
dune-project that lives in its own sub folder. Examples that contain
errors on purpose, for instance to showcase some specific compile
errors, go into the latter. All other examples should go in
correct/.
Examples in the correct/ folder are automatically built and tested
in the CI. It's possible to build and test them individually using
the dune alias corresponding to the example folder name. For instance,
to build and test the example in
book/imperative-programming/examples/correct/dictionary, one can
run:
dune build @dictionary
Note that the runtest alias will also build and test examples so
running make test will build all of the book's examples.
When adding a new chapter, the example folder should have the following structure:
examples/
βββ correct/
βββ dune
βββ dune.inc
βββ erroneous/
With the following dune file:
(data_only_dirs correct erroneous)
(rule
(deps
(source_tree ./))
(action
(with-stdout-to dune.gen
(run rwo-examples-rules ./))))
(rule
(alias runtest)
(action (diff dune.inc dune.gen)))
(include dune.inc)
From that point forward, running dune runtest will generate the
right dune rules for each folder in correct/. When the rules change,
they must be accepted through promotion first.
Each example must explicitly define its external dependencies in a
.rwo-example. For instance, if your example requires base and
core, it must include the following .rwo-example file at its root:
(packages base core)
Dependencies
RWO's dependencies are managed using the opam-monorepo plugin. The dependencies are expressed
in the rwo.opam opam file as they would be for any project. The plugin is used to generate a
rwo.opam.locked lockfile from this deps specification using the opam monorepo lock
command. Running opam monorepo pull will then fetch the sources locally into the duniverse/
folder so that rwo and its dependencies can all be built together in a single dune-workspace.
You can install it by running:
opam install opam-monorepo
Before running opam-monorepo lock it's important to have the proper opam configuration.
We need to both add the opam-overlays repo which contains dune port of some of our dependencies.
We also use a pinned version of ctypes until the dune-port is stable. To set these up, you can run:
opam repository add dune-opam-overlays git+https://github.com/dune-universe/opam-overlays.git
opam pin add ctypes.0.20.1+dune https://github.com/avsm/ocaml-ctypes.git#dune-port
opam pin add ctypes-foreign.0.20.1+dune https://github.com/avsm/ocaml-ctypes.git#dune-port
Upgrading or adding dependencies
Before upgrading or adding any dependency, you should make sure they are up-to-date according to the
rwo.opam file by running:
opam monorepo lock
opam monorepo pull
and committing the resulting duniverse/ and rwo.opam.locked if they changed. This preliminary
step will help distinguish how new dependency specifications actually impact the lockfile and
duniverse by splitting out the unrelated updates.
Once the above is done, you can modify the dune-project package definition by adding a new dependency
or modifying the bounds on an existing one. Then run:
dune build rwo.opam
opam monorepo lock
opam monorepo pull
to update the opam file, the lockfile and the duniverse folder.