An O(x)Caml book that runs(kcsrk.info) |
An O(x)Caml book that runs(kcsrk.info) |
Wow, this is wild!
> The thing I would love to reach is booting a compiled unikernel directly in wasm via WASI, with no Linux host underneath at all. That would make the last module as live as the rest.
Couldn't the Mirage unikernel thingy be used to compile a unikernel with all of the needed OCaml libs + i/o support? Thus negating the need for having to boot Linux inside of a browser tab? Couldn't that be done in all of the places they're booting Linux in a tab?
I need a Linux VM to illustrate a couple of things in the last few lectures. Showing C undefined behaviour, memory safety issues and how that becomes security issues, compiling OCaml program to show test coverage, and being able to build unikernels. So can’t completely do away with Linux VMs.
For Unikernels, currently v86 is 32-bit only and OCaml 5 has dropped support for native 32-bit backends. In order to boot 64-bit unikernels, I’d need qemu. All of this could be done, but (a) this is likely to be quite slow (and the current emulation already is) and (b) the learning objectives are probably not improved a lot with the additional infrastructure. Hence, dropped it.
Our tech stack is different but the choices we made are quite similar. Multi-tiered platform, markdown for authoring, executable exercises, teacher platform to produce, give, receive and grade homework/exams, etc. A distinguishing characteristic is that codeBoot's Python interpreter (pyinterp) allows single-stepping through the code. That's quite useful for teaching and studying.
We have a few exciting features coming up and we're working on a proper landing page and clean English translation for the book. If anybody is interested to learn more, reply here or contact me (email in my profile). I'd love to connect with educators, students or hackers alike!
I have used Jupyter notebooks with a Docker deployment in my prior courses for OCaml and Prolog, with support for auto grading (using nbgrader). Jupyter notebooks aren’t great for version control. Otherwise, it worked pretty well across multiple iterations of the course with new professors coming in and independently being able to use the infra.
Is that _really_ the case? I find it very unlikely (not just in an OCaml context).
You have to precisely follow a sequence of instructions without the experience to understand their purpose, or any idea of how to fix things if you make a mistake.
Web technology is an exception to this. People already have a web browser, and ignoring mobile devices, browsers come with a js REPL.