zack's home page/ blog/ posts/ 2008/ 11/ camlbz2 bzip2 ocaml bindings

CamlBZ2: OCaml bindings for libbz2

Since the next building block for proper compression support in Batteries is bzip2 integration, I started from the basic ingredient: OCaml bindings for bzip2.

It was not entirely missing: the old GZ project by Olivier Andrieu was in fact offering bzip2 bindings, but was doing that in tandem with gzip bindings (which already have a standard de facto implementation: Camlzip).

Hence I contacted the author and together we decided to split away the two parts and releasing CamlBZ2 as a new project, devoted to bzip2 bindings alone.

The old code has been ported to latest OCaml versions and a couple of bugs have been squashed in the interim. The project is now hosted on the OCaml forge, has its own homepage, and a Git repo (look ma, it looks like a serious project!).

Today I've made the first alpha release: CamlBZ2 0.5.99 is now available. It is intended to be a test release ... so please test it :-) and report any issue you find using the tracker.

Next steps for CamlBZ2:

  • 0.6.0 release,
  • a Debian package,
  • and of course an API flexible enough to enable Batteries integration!