Zero to OCaml in 1-Click: A Seamless Experience for Adopting OCaml

tl;dr: This year, Tarides is doubling down on making the OCaml adoption experience as smooth and modern as possible. Our goal is simple: one-click installation, one tool to build and manage your code (dune), and a unified package management experience powered by Dune Package Management (DPM). We're starting with internal adoption at Tarides and will share our progress with the community from there. But don't worry – none of the tools or workflows you use today are going away. We value OCaml's stability just as much as you do!

Lowering the Barrier to Entry

Today, adopting a new programming language isn’t just about learning syntax. Developers expect a cohesive, streamlined experience that gets them from zero to something real with minimal friction. A strong ecosystem, excellent documentation, and developer tools that ‘just work’ are minimum requirements. Without them, even languages that are expressive, safe, and fun to write can fail to gain traction.

This is where we want to revamp the experience of getting started with OCaml.

While the OCaml language has always been powerful and expressive, the initial setup has often felt fragmented – different tools for different tasks, many of them unfamiliar or loosely integrated. Looking at unified dev tooling in other ecosystems, like Rust's Cargo, Python's uv, or even Ada's Alire, there’s a thing or two OCaml could learn.

We are changing this with Zero to OCaml in 1-click.

One-Click, One Tool, One Flow

Our goal is to reduce the friction of getting started with OCaml by building an adoption experience around a single, powerful tool: dune. If you're familiar with Rust, you can think of dune as OCaml’s answer to Cargo – not just a build system, but a tool to create, build, test, install, and manage packages.

In practice, this means two things:

• A one-click installation experience that gets you everything you need.
• A single entry point for all workflows: build, test, run, format, lint.

While it should be trivial to get started for newcomers, moving from your first “Hello World” to a real-world OCaml project should feel intuitive, fast, and delightful.

To explore what this would look like for OCaml, we launched the Dune Developer Preview in 2025. This is a fast-moving, opt-in environment where we can iterate on new features without breaking the existing ecosystem.

Call for Feedback – If you're someone who likes being at the cutting edge, we encourage you to check it out. The more feedback we get now, the better the final experience will be!

The preview has given us the space to experiment, improve, and refine the developer experience, while the rest of the tooling stayed stable and reliable. Now, we’re ready to start rolling out some of these features to production.

From Preview to Production: Our Rollout Plan

Maturing features like package management from a developer preview to a reliable foundation for the community takes care and time. The end goal is for everyone to be able to benefit, but to make sure we don’t break anything, we are approaching our task in stages:

1. Internal Adoption at Tarides

Tarides maintains many core tools in the OCaml ecosystem, including some of the most complex and widely-used OCaml projects. We're using these as our proving ground. If Dune Package Management can support our internal projects, it likely can support yours, too.

We have audited our major repositories and begun migrating them to DPM. This has helped us uncover bugs, identify gaps, and prioritise improvements. We're also documenting what we learn along the way – sharing those lessons here, so you don't have to make the same mistakes.

Early results are promising, but we've noted where developer workflows still need better integration – especially around editor support (VS Code, Neovim) and the OCaml language server.

2. Community & External Adoption

After we have matured DPM internally, we will shift our focus to help others adopt. We will adapt the process to suit different users:

• Newcomers: We are redesigning the onboarding flow to be as effortless as possible. Think updates to ocaml.org, better tutorials, and templates that work out of the box.

• Commercial Users: If you're a company interested in adopting DPM, we would love to work with you. Real-world feedback is incredibly valuable; we're here to support your migration! Reach out to commercial@tarides.com.

• The Broader OCaml Community: The community has a long history of valuing stability, so we are striving to ensure that all existing workflows will continue to be supported and nothing will break.

What’s Next

We will be publishing more updates over the coming months, including:

• Deep dives into how we migrated specific tools and projects.
• Practical guides for adopting Dune Package Management.
• Regular progress updates on the rollout.
• Tips, gotchas, and lessons learned.

Adopting a new programming language should be a smooth and pleasant experience. With a one-click install, one tool to rule them all, and a focus on usability, we're working hard to make that truer than ever for OCaml. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try OCaml, that moment will arrive soon! Sign up to our mailing list to stay tuned.

Happy OCamling! / Leandro

Stay in touch with us on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and LinkedIn. We look forward to hearing from you!