I spent some time this week trying to upgrade vpnkit to OCaml 5. I was originally working on a paper idea which might need benchmarks, but Anil and I decided we could simply point to the port I did and show how it has simplified much of the code.

Work continued on implementing (and fully exploring) void processes. A lot of the groundwork already exists in Jake Hillion's master's thesis.

This week I added a feature that I needed to help build the processes we need for the shell I'm building: mount points with modes!

In addition to the root mount (taken care of with pivot_root), we need to be able to add additional mounts into the process' environment. These can now be added. All mount points can be mounted readonly or readwrite.

Here is the "Hello, World!" example (the /say/hey program has been statically compiled using musl-gcc).

let status =
  let void =
    empty 
    |> mount ~mode:R ~src:hey_dir ~tgt:"say"
    |> exec [ "/say/hey" ]
  in
  let t = Void.spawn ~sw void in
  Promise.await (Void.exit_status t)

There really is nothing else in there. Without specifying a root mount, the void process is started with an empty tmpfs root. Next on the list is networking!

I got a little side-tracked building a library for writing LSP servers in OCaml: mlsp. This may seem a little unrelated, but it isn't. The LSP has become the de facto standard for communicating between an editor and a programming language environment. If you have used VSCode to write a program in Python, chances are you are using the official extension which gives you linting, formatting, code navigation etc. All of these features are communicating using the LSP.

It seems Code Mirror can already proxy over a websocket for LSP support too (we might not even need that as we can compile OCaml directly to JavaScript/Webassembly and have the whole thing running locally!).

Anil and I had a great conversation this week about building community especially as it pertains to open-source and OCaml.

I've been going back over Governing the Commons, but have already discovered The Real World of Technology!

More thoughts on all of this soon... maybe