dev meeting 2024 03 05

Present: @emillon @gridbugs @jchavarri @leonidas-from-xiv @moyodiallo @rgrinberg

per-context library namespaces (@jchavarri)

• refs: #10170, #10179
• Javier did a presentation of what he's trying to achieve (cf linked PRs).
• Design makes sense but this needs work to delay some checks.
• Javier will post a description of the problem as a new issue

Recursive aliases in vendored dirs (@rgrinberg)

• ref: #10144
• There are actually 2 problems:
  • projects that rely on recursive aliases in their rules, will break when being vendored (hasn't been reported)
  • recursive aliases do not propagate down to vendored dirs
• The current vendoring model is a bit weird. Doing it per directory rather than per dune-project is strange but had its benefits.
• for the second issue, whether we want to recurse or not depends on the (builtin) alias: fmt, no, check, probably.

OCAMLRUNPARAM=b (@leonidas-from-xiv)

• ref: #10193
• deoptimizing in the dev profile is already a thing
  • (this is done in particular for jsoo, but this might not be the example to follow since it can be surprising)
• 2 different discussions: whether we should do it, and how to do it
• if the compiler had a flag to build an executable that starts with backtraces, we'd use it
• just in dune exec and related seem fine.
• using a wrapping script would work on unix, but not on Windows
  • is there a way to set automatic variables to .exe files on Windows?
• does OCAMLPARAM support something like that?
  • no, it's just for passing arguments to the compiler.