View all changes

Call for Feedback

Hello folks! 👋

We'd like to welcome everyone to try and play with the Dune Developer Preview! 🎉

This experimental nightly release of dune includes a lot of improvements, including the much expected package management features, and it can be installed from that website or by using the new installation script:

$ curl -fsSL https://get.dune.build/install | bash

In a few seconds you should be ready to OCaml by calling dune:

Installing the Dune Developer Preview|690x442

You can also watch and share this demo on X and Mastodon.

Please try it out and let us know what you think 🙏

📅 You can book a feedback call with us here

📝 You can submit feedback using this form

🐛 You can submit issues to Github on ocaml/dune

Changes since last update

The Dune shared cache has been enabled by default. We're starting off by caching all downloads and dependencies.

We have improved support for dev tools. We're working to streamline this but in the latest binary you can:

  • Configure your LSP (in Neovim, Vim, Emacs, etc) to call dune tools exec ocamllsp to get LSP support for your projects out of the box – this may take a little bit the first time it builds the LSP for a compiler version, but it's pretty much instant afterwards.

  • Call dune fmt to get your project formatted – remember to add an .ocamlformat file if you don't have one yet. An empty one is enough.

  • Call dune ocaml doc to get documentation built

What's next?

We're looking forward to streamlining the DX, working on better dependency locks, and looking into supporting Windows.

In particular, we're considering work on a few things:

  • dune create <repo> – to let the community create templates that can be easily used from within dune
  • dune pkg fetch – to prefetch packages and prepare a repository for working in offline mode
  • dune build @deps - to build all dependencies, useful for staged builds in Dockerfiles
  • dune pkg add <name> - to make adding packages straightforward
  • a short-hand syntax for pins on github
  • and more!

If you've got any ideas, we'd love to hear them, so please open a feature request on Github 🙏

Other updates

FunOCaml Presentation

At FunOCaml we had a last-minute opportunity to present the work being done on Dune and we used it to introduce the Developer Preview to the community, and even tested Package Management live with suggestions from the audience (thanks @anmonteiro and Paul-Elliot for participating!) – you can watch it on Twitch.

New design

We're working with @Claire_Vandenberghe on redesigning the Developer Preview website so that it'd feel like a seamless extension of OCaml.org – in this current iteration we've made it easier to get started and we're putting the FAQ front and center.

We'll be iterating on this design in the coming weeks until it fits perfectly within the OCaml.org design system 🎨

You can check the new website here: https://preview.dune.build

Upcoming Blog posts

In the near future we'll be publishing blog posts about the Developer Preview and Package Management, which we're working on with @professor.rose 👏