Hello!
Since last September, the Melange, Dune, and Ahrefs development teams have been working to enhance the integration between Dune and Melange. As a company that uses a lot of OCaml in the backend, Ahrefs saw an opportunity to bring its frontend stack closer to OCaml by using Melange while still integrating with the JavaScript ecosystem of UI libraries. Thus, the company decided to invest and actively participate to make this integration happen.
I am happy to announce we achieved a significant milestone in this integration process: we transitioned all Ahrefs frontend projects to use Melange. We have explained this transition in detail in a blog post:
Regarding the current state of Melange, it’s worth noting that our focus thus far has been on designing and implementing the Dune-Melange integration and applying it within Ahrefs. The goal has been to demonstrate that the toolchain can scale and be used in mid-large codebases, and the result has been successful so far. The process has been beneficial not only for Melange but also for Dune itself, as we were able to identify and address some performance issues, including a significant performance fix that made some build commands nearly 10 times faster in our case.
While we’ve made significant progress with the Dune-Melange integration, we recognize that there is still work to be done to improve the documentation and developer experience. Currently, Melange lacks a dedicated documentation site, and the latest functionality isn’t yet available in published versions of Dune and Melange on the opam repository.
We’re actively working to address this, but in the meantime, we invite those who are adventurous to explore the melange-opam-template and review the newly added melange.emit stanza documentation found in the latest version of Dune’s documentation. If you have any questions, encounter any issues, or otherwise want to participate in any way, we invite you to join the #melange channel in the Reason Discord.
Thank you for taking the time to read about our progress with the Dune-Melange integration. We hope you share our excitement about this project!
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