At the very end of 2011, and then at the very beginning of 2013, I worked for some weeks on namespaces for OCaml (what they could be, why would we need them, what would be a good solution). The resulting proposal was too complex to gather steam, so I moved on – and never got around to making the documents publicly available. Here they are.

In case you are interest in archeology of design proposals (or if you want to work on namespaces for OCaml in the future), you can now access

This work was done in collaboration with Didier Rémy, but also Nicolas Pouillard (for the second document), and really I enjoyed working on this and with them. The reception at the time was rather cold, as people thought the proposal too complex with respect to the actual needs. Alain Frisch proposed to “just extend the module M = N construct to do what we want”, and this was later implemented by Jacques Garrigues as module aliases – although some issues, such as linking against two different versions of the same library, are still unadressed.

The proposal suggested a language to describe namespaces, and a natural tendency of programming language enthusiasts is to make their language as expressive as possible. It’s easy to make a design more frigthening than necessary by adding these couple of extra operators that make the design feel complete in this and that respect that maybe we don’t really care about.

An interesting tidbit research-wise is that I was very interested in the fact that we could reflect namespaces as OCaml modules – which I thought at the beginning to be impossible because namespaces where “open” things and modules “closed” things. In fact, we realized that modules could work for this, but that mixins would be an even better fit. A few months afterwards (and independently) Backpack ( Scott Kilpatrick, Derek Dreyer, Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow) was announced as part of Scott Kilpatrick’s PhD work. It was very exciting to see related ideas masterfully developed in this different context.