Hello, my name is Xavier Van de Woestyne, and you've landed on the index of my personal website (though it doesn't deal much with personal things, so it's fine). This page is an English-language summary of my personal website (written in French); it essentially follows the structure of a traditional blog.
Index
You can find me on Mastodon, on Github, on X/Twitter, on BlueSky (or elsewhere (FR)) and, in the real-life, in Nantes, Sometimes in Bruxelles and from time to time in Paris. If you read French, feel free to visit my French-language page (which is more complete).
Essays and ramblings
Here is a list of articles/translations on various subjects, such as OCaml.
-
Why I chose OCaml as my primary languageI started using the OCaml language regularly around 2012, and since then, my interest and enthusiasm for this language have only grown. It has become my preferred choice for almost all my personal projects, and it has also influenced my professional choices. Since 2014, I have been actively participating in public conferences dedicated to programming and software development, where I often express my enthusiasm for OCaml in ways that may be a bit over the top (but always passionate). This has earned me, in a friendly way, the nickname OCaml evangelist — a title that, I admit, I find very flattering. Moreover, I’m not alone in thinking this. Despite the common misconception that OCaml wouldn’t be a pragmatic choice for industry, major companies such as Meta, Microsoft, Ahref, Tarides, OCamlPro, Bloomberg, Docker, Janestreet, Citrix, Tezos, and many others actively use it.
-
The Hell of Tetra MasterTetra Master is the optional card game in Final Fantasy IX. At first glance, it seems similar to Triple Triad — the card game from Final Fantasy VIII. And while you can develop a general intuition for how to win, especially if you have strong cards, after playing over a hundred matches, I had to admit something: just playing the game and reading all the in-game tutorials wasn’t enough to truly understand the rules. Eventually, I gave in and started looking things up to figure out what I was missing. The complete absence of any actual rules — whether in the game or the manual — left me utterly frustrated, which is what led me to write this article, illustrated in OCaml.
-
OCaml, modules, and import schemesThe OCaml module system can be intimidating, and it typically involves the use of many keywords—for example,
openandinclude, which allow importing definitions into a module. Since version OCaml4.08, theopenprimitive has been generalized to allow the opening of arbitrary module expressions. In this article, we’ll explore how to use this generalization to reproduce a common practice in other languages, what I somewhat pompously call import strategies, to describe patterns likeimport {a, b as c} from K, without relying on a (sub-)language dedicated specifically to importing. -
Guarded methods in OCamlGuarded methods allow attaching constraints to the receiver (
self) only for certain methods, thus allowing these methods to be called only if the receiver satisfies these constraints (these guards). OCaml does not syntactically allow defining this kind of method directly. In this note, we will see how to encode them using a type equality witness.