[ocaml-infra] [Caml-list] Concurrent/parallel programming

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 8 Jan 2014, at 22:13, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Regarding a place to share ideas, it seems like it would be very useful to have an official ocaml wiki. Haskell has this and it's a huge help. In fact, I would say haskell development would be greatly hampered without it. There's so much information that's relevant to more than one library ie. doesn't fit in any particular library's documentation. It wouldn't be too hard to set up a wikimedia instance on ocaml.org, would it? Alternatively it should be pretty easy to set up something on wikia. This wiki would also be a great place to describe the conceptual implementation of the compiler, which is again what haskell has.

We do have a fledgling service for "domain-specific" conversations, in the form of lists.ocaml.org.  In fact, we set up a "wg-parallel" mailing list last year, but never announced it for various reasons.  This seems like a good time to advertise its existence:

http://lists.ocaml.org/pipermail/wg-parallel/

(note that if anyone else would like an archived list on lists.ocaml.org for a project or community group, then please do drop a line to infrastructure at lists.ocaml.org to request it)

Regarding other services on ocaml.org, we (the "infrastructure team") are happy to set them up, but please bear in mind that they all come with a maintenance burden.  Dealing with security issues, backups, software updates, outages all take up time, and I confess a preference for sipping martinis and hacking on code instead of sysadmin work. Jeremy and Leo got tired of waiting for me to set up the wiki too, and started:
https://github.com/ocamllabs/compiler-hacking/wiki

If you follow the links through there, there is a 'compiler internals' page that would be good to contribute to, and you (or anyone else) is extremely welcome to add more information on topics such as parallel programming libraries there.  I think we could have a decent stab at a wiki.ocaml.org by backing it against a GitHub repository, and not have to do any special hosting for it at all (the OPAM web pages work in a similar fashion at the moment).  But for now though, I'd recommend focussing on the problem at hand (parallel programming) and getting some information down somewhere, and less on the lack of a central wiki.

-anil
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