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Fantasy Tutorial

This section includes the tutorial we wish we could write for the OCaml tools. Still very much in development.

The ideal experience

The ideal setup experience is to... have no steps at all. This is possible recently by using devcontainers, which is a metadata standard that allows IDEs and cloud services like GitHub CodeSpaces to launch a development environment.

The Real World OCaml v2 includes sufficient metadata to make this just work. You can clone the book repository and open it in VSCode, and it will automatically configure a container with the right tools in place. Similarly, you can open the repository in GitHub Codespaces and it spins up a tutorial.

While this is a great first user experience, there is still some work to be done for a truely native tools install. A tutorial should subsequently cover the next step for a native installation after the user has gotten started using development containers.

Preliminaries

Before starting the tutorial proper, what are the steps we want the tutorial to cover?

Setup/initializaion

  • Should cover common use-cases
  • Maybe: Linux (e.g., on a VM), Mac, locally, and Windows, via WSL2.
  • Install basic tools
  • We could "cheat" and do it via containers, i.e., get them to install Docker first.
    • But the container is hiding complexity of the underlying tools in a way that's going to come out when someone needs to write their own docker setup, or to do a local install. So there's a real tradeoff here.