From the Hackacamel list I picked up working on the cdf plotter using TUI. Now I have never developed TUIs or GUIs so I thought this would be the perfect thing to do.
The initial hurdle was choosing the library, I wanted to try use OCaml 5 so I chose Minttea which is TUI framework inspired by Bubble Tea implemented in Golang and uses the The elm architecture (The TEA in minttea).
Since Minttea is a nascent framework I knew it would be a little difficut to learn but the examples provided helped me get to a working mvp quickly although I added some of my own hurdles just to learn stuff. This was not my motive but I like shock therapy.
And I have tinkering with esy for a while and I thought let's try and build a esy-dune workflow to build my projects.
And it was simple to build and play with things. I realised I don't need to have a .merlin file if I am using dune.
Dune has a nice way of getting the LSP up and running even with esy. One only needs to specify the dependencies
and dev dependencies : Tools that one plans to use like ocaml-lsp-server, ocamlformat etc.
And one more thing : just use esy prefix to build stuff like : esy dune build ./bin/main.exe to build and esy dune exec ./bin/main.exe
I was also scared with the Fmt library I have never been able to use the Format library because a lot of things don't make sense
and I think this blurb wouldn't be enough for explaining that but I realised Fmt is a nice way to use Format because there are ways to sanity check
using Fmt.Dump.<data-structure>. Later I got to know about pp pretty printer. Which is something that I didn't know and I am thankful for Thibbaut for that.
Nope, it was hard for me to get a dot printed on the first day because I realised a lot of special characters weren't supported in my outdated version of alacritty.
And then the second day I was able to get the cartesian axis but I couldn't go further in day 3 and day 4.
Mostly because I was kind of having a hard time able to resize the axis for different sizes of terminals and also is there a better way to do it.
This the repo is here. But I think even it looks like nothing (because it is nothing) I am happy that I started working on this.
Well for one, if you clone this repo there are things that might not work because I am trying to parse the output olly generates. My plan is to get the repo useful for plotting multiple benchmarks on TUI.
And I am seriously considering working on more GUIs and TUIs because it was fun.
I am hoping to it finish this weekend. At least plotting a static graph. Resizing seems like a non-trivial problem but I am sure the TUI communities might have solved it.
I want to thank KC, Sudha and Ganesh for organizing OCamlretreat, it was a blast I wish to come again next time.