This is a cross port from the mirgaeOS Blog. We have been on a hack retreat in Morocco to work on an OCaml unikernel Operating System. Go to the official mirageOS Blog to read more amazing articles.
Original Post
“Let’s make operating systems great again” – with this in mind we started our trip to Marrakech. But first things first: we are two first year computer science students from Berlin with not a whole lot of knowledge of hypervisors, operating systems or functional programming. This at first seems like a problem… and it turned out it was :). The plan was set, let’s learn this amazing language called OCaml and start hacking on some code, right? But, as you could imagine, it turned out to be different yet even better experience. When we arrived, we received a warm welcome in Marrakech from very motivated people who were happy to teach us new things from their areas of expertise. We wanted to share some of our valuable knowledge as well, so we taught some people how to play Cambio, our favourite card game, and it spread like wildfire (almost everyone was playing it in the second evening). We’re glad that we managed to set back productivity in such a fun way. ;P
Back to what we came to Morocco for: as any programming language, OCaml seems to provide its special blend of build system challenges. Rudi was kind enough to help us navigate the labyrinth of distribution packages, opam, and ocamlfind with great patience and it took us only two days to get it almost right.
Finally having a working installation, we got started by helping Michele with his ocaml-acme package, a client for Let’s Encrypt (and other services implementing the protocol). An easy to use and integrate client seemed like one feature that could provide a boost to unikernel adoption and it looked like a good match for us as OCaml beginners since there are many implementations in other programming languages that we could refer to. After three days we finally made our first Open Source OCaml contributions to this MirageOS-related project by implementing the dns-01 challenge.
Hacking away on OCaml code of course wasn’t the only thing we did in Marrakech: we climbed the Atlas mountains to see the seven magic waterfalls (little disclaimer: there are only four). It was not a really productive day but great for building up the spirit which makes the community so unique and special. Seeing camels might also helped a little bit. ;)
One of the most enjoyable things that the retreat provided was the chance for participants to share knowledge through presentations which lead to very interesting conversations like after Amir’s presentation when some artists asked about sense of life and computer systems (by the way, one question is already solved and it is ’42’). We were also very impressed by the power and expressiveness of functional languages which Sprios demonstrated in his parser combinator Angstrom.
Thank you to everyone involved for giving us the experience of an early ‘enlightenment’ about functional programming as first year students and the engaging discussions with so many amazing people! We sure learned a lot and will continue working with OCaml and MirageOS whenever possible.
Hope to see all of you again next time!