Section: New Results

Merlin: understanding a language server

Participant : Gabriel Scherer.

Thomas Réfis (Jane Street) and Frédéric Bour maintain the Merlin language server of OCaml, a tool that provides language-aware features to text editors. We collaborated with them on dissecting the tool and explaining its design and evolution ([4]); the similarities and differences with usual compiler frontends may inform future language implementation work, and our language-agnostic presentation may be of use to tool designers for other languages and proof assistants.