What's next for Melange

What we plan to do for Q3 2023

We’re quite happy with how far Melange has come – I previously wrote about releasing Melange 1.0 and a retrospective on Q2 2023.

But we’re not done yet: there’s more in slate for the next quarter. I’ll tell you what we’re looking to achieve in Q3 2023.

We’ve decided to call the next Melange version 2.0 – we plan to make a few breaking changes. The main goal for this quarter is to release Melange 2.0. We will focus across a few different axes.

OCaml (and OCaml Platform) compatibility

Melange integrates with the most popular workflows in the OCaml ecosystem. Dune builds Melange projects. Merlin and the OCaml LSP power editor integration. OCamlformat and Reason’s refmt automatically format code. dune-release publishes Melange libraries and PPX to the OPAM repository. odoc builds package documentation.

In Melange 2.0, we will:

• Upgrade the Melange type-checker and standard library to OCaml 5.1:

  • Turn off Effect Handlers for the time being.

  • Provide a compatible Domain module shim.

• Move the Melange internal PPX completely out of the compiler, into melange.ppx:

• Wrap the Belt and Js libraries:

  • These currently expose all their internal modules. Dune can wrap them nicely under a single top-level module.

• Break out melange.node:

  • The Node.js bindings are rarely used. We will require melange.node be added to the Dune libraries field.

Developer Experience

While Melange already integrates with the OCaml Platform tooling and workflow, there is space to make the experience of developing Melange projects even better.

We want to focus on:

• Improving the editing experience:

  • Melange can compile FFI externals better, in a way that works better with analysis tools such as Merlin.

  • reason-react-ppx doesn’t faithfully respect the JSX node locations. We want to fix that so that “go to definition” works better for Reason JSX.

• Improving the interaction between OPAM and npm:

  • Melange bridges the OPAM and npm ecosystems. Some packages published to OPAM depend on npm dependencies at runtime.

  • We want to explore solving this issue, starting with a tool that checks that the required npm dependencies are installed in Melange projects.

• Generating Source Maps:

  • Source Maps allow mapping generated code back to the original OCaml / Reason source.

  • Among other benefits, source maps allow for better stack traces that map to the original lines of code that triggered runtime crashes.

Documentation and Branding:

We released melange.re alongside Melange 1.0. The website contains our initial efforts to document Melange workflows, and it can be improved upon. Over the next few months, we will:

• Develop unified Melange brand guidelines and apply them to the website.

• Continue documenting Melange workflows:

  • We’ve already seen some user contributions. We’re looking to keep improving the Melange documentation in response to feedback from Melange users.

Wrapping up

We have a lot of work ahead of us. The best way to help us is to try Melange. We’d love to read your feedback.

I tried to summarize what we’ll be up to in the near future. The full Melange Roadmap for Q3 2023 goes into more detail.

Happy hacking!