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Help Needed

Are you looking to help the OCaml ecosystem, but not sure where to start? This page should give you some ideas of where the community thinks work is needed.

It’s worth keeping in mind that making the ecosystem just a little more usable, especially at critical points, can have massive implications downstream.

Documentation

• odoc (needs help, high priority): the new standard documentation tool for OCaml. Unfortunately, it still needs some love – check out the Issues. This is a great place to contribute since a little effort on the documentation front can go a long way.
• doc.ocaml.org (non-existent): We need to have a central site for documentation of all packages. Odoc already does a good job on package documentation generation. We would like the CI infrastructure to build docs for each package as it tests it.

Web and Networking

• HTTP2 (high priority): no bindings. There are issues to provide HTTP2 support for both Cohttp and HTTP/AF. This is very important as it’s currently a barrier to OCaml being used as a server language.

• gRPC: no support. Requires HTTP2. There is an issue in the official project. There is also a discussion on the OCaml discourse.

• Elasticsearch (needs help): the defacto standard search solution. ocaml-elasticsearch is abandoned.

• GraphQL client (needs help): Having ppx_graphql support the full GraphQL spec opens up the possibility to interact with many APIs that expose a GraphQL endpoint including Github.

GUI

• LablGTK3 (needs help) - not yet feature complete as GTK2 state, see lablgtk3 branch.

Machine Learning

• OWL (needs help): OCaml’s equivalent to Numpy and Pytorch. Currently, the project doesn’t support GPUs, which hurts its adoption by machine learning professionals.

Cloud Technology

• Google Cloud Platform: no bindings.
• NATS/NATS Streaming: no bindings. Part of the Cloud Native Foundation and gaining increased adoption.

Chat bots

• Our current bots for the discord channel use node.js code which is fairly unreliable. For example, rss-bot - a bot for displaying rss feeds in discord - tends to run out of memory. We’d much prefer to have a Discord library in OCaml, and possibly a bot creation library. This may be a good starting point.