May 2023: How to Build OCaml with Bazel (Tim Jäger @ SandboxAQ)

During the Bazel Community Day held in San Francisco on May 23rd 2023, Tim Jaeger from SandboxAQ (www.sandboxaq....) held a lightning talk about how to Build OCaml with Bazel.
Tim Jäger, a software engineer at SandboxAQ, spoke about the upcoming risks around quantum computers. Shor's algorithm can break RSA encryption and Diffie-Hellman key exchange, both of which are widely used. Quantum computers capable of executing Shor's algorithm at scale don't exist yet, but likely will in 10-30 years, and large adversaries are already capturing and storing encrypted traffic in order to decrypt it later. Quantum-resistant algorithms already exist, but migration to them is difficult.
SandboxAQ acquired a company called Cryptosense to help with this migration. Cryptosense primarily uses the OCaml programming language, and SandboxAQ needed to build their code with Bazel.
OCaml developers primarily use the Dune build system, developed at Jane Street. Tim built an OCaml rule set for Bazel, supporting libraries, binaries, tests, packaging, type checking. They even have an ocaml_repl rule allowing developers to start an interactive prompt in any package. Their rules can also import OCaml dependencies into WORKSPACE.bazel files.
Learn more about Bazel events hosted by EngFlow:
www.engflow.co...