Articles written by Fabrice Le Fessant

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L’équipe d’OCamlPro a récemment été sollicitée par l’association Roglo, une association française de généalogie qui gère une base de plus de 10 millions de personnes connectées dans un même arbre généalogique, et dont la base s'accroît d’environ 500 000 nouvelles contributions ... (Read more)

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In this post, I will present some work that we did on the GnuCOBOL compiler, the only fully-mature open-source compiler for COBOL. It all started with a bug issued by one of our customers that we fixed by improving the preprocessing pass of the compiler. We later went on and optimised it to get bett... (Read more)

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Since 2022, OCamlPro has been contributing to GnuCOBOL, the only fully open-source compiler for the COBOL language. To speed-up our contributions to the compiler, we developed a new tool, autofonce, to be able to easily run and modify the testsuite of the compiler, originally written as a GNU Autoco... (Read more)

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We recently worked on a project to build a binary installer for OCaml, inspired from RustUp for Rust. We had to build binary packages of the distribution for every OCaml version since 4.02.0, and we were surprised to discover that their (compressed) size grew from 18 MB to about 200 MB. This post gi... (Read more)

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OCamlPro started working on blockchains in 2014, when Arthur Breitman came to us with an initial idea to develop the Tezos ledger. The idea was very challenging with a lot of innovations. So, we collaborated with him to write a specification, and to turn the specification into OCaml code. Since then... (Read more)

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Ce troisième article consacré à l’amélioration du stockage dans Tezos fait suite à l’annonce de la mise à disposition d’une image docker pour les beta testeurs souhaitant essayer notre système de stockage et garbage collector. Voir Improving Tezos Storage : Gitlab branch for testers... (Read more)

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This article is the third post of a series of posts on improving Tezos storage. In our previous post, we announced the availability of a docker image for beta testers, wanting to test our storage and garbage collector. Today, we are glad to announce that we rebased our code on the latest version of ... (Read more)

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Tezos est aujourd’hui un projet open source, un réseau international développé par des équipes sur plus de cinq continents. Dans la genèse du projet, l’entreprise française OCamlPro, qui développe encore aujourd’hui de nombreux projets liés à Tezos (TZscan, Liquidity, etc.), a joué u... (Read more)

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In a previous post, we presented some work that we did to improve the quantity of storage used by the Tezos node. Our post generated a lot of comments, in which upcoming features such as garbage collection and pruning were introduced. It also motivated us to keep working on this (hot) topic, and we ... (Read more)

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Running a Tezos node currently costs a lot of disk space, about 59 GB for the context database, the place where the node stores the states corresponding to every block in the blockchain, since the first one. Of course, this is going to decrease once garbage collection is integrated, i.e. removing ve... (Read more)

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In a previous blogpost, we presented the RPCs used by tezos-client to send a transfer operation to a tezos-node. We were left with two remaining questions: How to forge a binary operation, for signature How to sign a binary operation In this post, we will reply to these questions. We are still assum... (Read more)

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Dans cet article technique, nous introduisons brièvement les RPCs dans Tezos à travers un exemple simple montrant comment le client Tezos interagit avec le noeud lors d’une instruction de transfert. Les RPCs de Tezos sont des requêtes HTTP (GET ou POST) auxquelles les noeuds Tezos répondent da... (Read more)

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In this technical blog post, we will briefly introduce Tezos RPCs through a simple example: we will show how the tezos-client program interacts with the tezos-node during a transfer command. Tezos RPCs are HTTP queries (GET or POST) to which tezos-node replies in JSON format. They are the only way f... (Read more)

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In October 2017, after the Tezos ICO, OCamlPro started to work on a block explorer for Tezos. For us, it was the most important software that we could contribute to the community, after the node itself, of course. We used it internally to monitor the Tezos alphanet, until its official public release... (Read more)

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New Team Members We are pleased to welcome three new members in our OCamlPro team since the beginning of November: Benjamin Canou started working at OCamlPro on the Richelieu project, an effort to bring better safety and performance to the Scilab language. He is in charge of a type inference algorit... (Read more)

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OCaml 4.00.0 has been released on July 27, 2012. For the first time, the new OCaml includes some of the work we have been doing during the last year. In this article, I will present our main contributions, mostly funded by Jane Street and Lexifi. Binary Annotations for Advanced Development Tools OCa... (Read more)

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We have recently worked on modifying the OCaml system to be able to pack a set of modules within a functor, parameterized on some signatures. This page presents this work, funded by Jane Street. All the patches on this page are provided for OCaml version 3.12.1. Packing Functors Installation of the ... (Read more)

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Recently, I have been experimenting wiht OCaml / MSVC running on Windows 7 64bit. I have mainly followed what the OCaml’s README.win32 was saying and I learned some NSIS tricks. The result of this experiment is the following two (rather big) windows binaries : ocaml-trunk-64-installer.exe (92 MB) ... (Read more)

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When you are beginning in a new programming language, it is sometimes helpful to have an overview of the documentation, that you can pin on your wall and easily have a look at it while you are programming. Since we couldn’t find such Cheat Sheets, we decided to start writting our own cheat sheets ... (Read more)

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You will need OCaml 3.11.2 installed on a i686 linux computer. The archive contains: libcamlrun-linux-i686.a ocamlrun-linux-i686 Makefile README The Makefile has two targets: sudo make install will save /usr/bin/ocamlrun and /usr/lib/ocaml/libcamlrun.a in the current directory and replace them with ... (Read more)