dev meeting 20201030

Present at the meeting:

• Carl Eastlund (@ceastlund)
• Sonja Heinze (@pitag-ha)
• Nathan Rebours (@NathanReb)

Current plan

• Sonja finishes the first Astlib implementation
• Sonja finishes the bisect_ppx port
• Nathan adds the required features for bucklescript compat of the as_ppx driver
• Carl finishes the ppx_import port

Meeting notes

Sonja is almost done with Astlib, it now compiles and passes the test with (implicit_transitive_deps false). There is still a bit of work to clean up the code and the API but we're getting there! She also started looking into the changes needed in ppxlib to allow users to get the input_name from the expansion context. The existing expansion context contains a Code_path.t which can be used to retrieve the filename but this one isn't set the same way input_name is and therefore can't always be used as a replacement. Both are meaningful and should be available from the context.

Carl worked on ppx_import's port. The work is split into three parts to ease the review process:

1. The API change: [%%import type t = ...] instead of type t = [%import ...]
2. The ppxlib port
3. The bump to the 4.11 AST

The port is pretty much ready but the tests don't pass because they depend on ppx-es that haven't been ported yet. We need to decide if they need to ported as well or if the tests should instead rely on already existing ppxlib-based implementation of those ppx-es.

Nathan took care of releasing ppxlib.0.19.0 and omp.1.8.0 which both bring 4.12 compatibility. He also pushed a branch of ppxlib which internally uses the 4.12 AST instead of the 4.11. The ocamlformat team will be able to use it to prepare for the 4.12 compiler release.