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OCaml 5.1.0 - Second Alpha

With the progress of the ongoing stabilisation effort for OCaml 5.1.0, I am happy to announce a second alpha release for OCaml 5.1.0.

This second alpha release contains many noteworthy fixes:

  • a long-awaited GC fix
  • a Windows ABI fix

as announced in the first alpha but also

  • a compiler-libs (parsetree) fix
  • a type system compatibility enhancement change
  • a restored backed for s390x/IBM Z

The full list of changes since the first alpha is available below.

Once most major OCaml tools are updated to the last compiler-libs changes, we will switch to beta releases. Hopefully, this will happen in the upcoming weeks. The progress on stabilising the ecosystem is tracked on the opam readiness for 5.1.0 meta-issue.

Currently, the release is still planned for around July.

If you find any bugs, please report them on OCaml's issue tracker.

If you are interested in the ongoing list of new features and bug fixes, the updated change log for OCaml 5.1.0 is available on GitHub.

Installation Instructions

The base compiler can be installed as an opam switch with the following commands on opam 2.1:

opam update
opam switch create 5.1.0~alpha2

The source code for the alpha is also available at these addresses:

Fine-Tuned Compiler Configuration

If you want to tweak the configuration of the compiler, you can switch to the option variant with:

opam update
opam switch create <switch_name> ocaml-variants.5.1.0~alpha2+options <option_list>

where option_list is a space-separated list of ocaml-option-* packages. For instance, for a flambda and no-flat-float-array switch:

opam switch create 5.1.0~alpha2+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.5.1.0~alpha2+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array

All available options can be listed with opam search ocaml-option.

See full changelog

Runtime System

  • #11589, #11903: Modify the GC pacing code to make sure the GC keeps up with allocations in the presence of idle domains. (Damien Doligez and Stephen Dolan, report by Florian Angeletti, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan and Sadiq Jaffer)
  • (breaking change) #11865, #11868, #11876: Clarify that the operations of a custom block must never access the OCaml runtime. The previous documentation only mentioned the main illicit usages. In particular, since OCaml 5.0, it is no longer safe to call caml_remove_global_root or caml_remove_generational_global_root from within the C finalizer of a custom block, or within the finalization function passed to caml_alloc_final. As a workaround, such a finalization operation can be registered with Gc.finalize instead, which guarantees to run the finalizer at a safe point. (Report by Timothy Bourke, discussion by Yotam Barnoy, Timothy Bourke, Sadiq Jaffer, Xavier Leroy, Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, and Gabriel Scherer)
  • #11827, +#12249: Restore prefetching for GC marking (Fabrice Buoro and Stephen Dolan, review by Gabriel Scherer and Sadiq Jaffer)

  • #12131: Simplify implementation of weak hash sets, fixing a performance regression. (Nick Barnes, review by François Bobot, Alain Frisch and Damien Doligez).

  • #12231: Support MinGW-w64 11.0 winpthreads library, where the macro to set up to get flexdll working changed (David Allsopp and Samuel Hym, light review by Xavier Leroy)

Type System

  • (breaking change) #12189, #12211: anonymous row variables in explicitly polymorphic type annotation, e.g. 'a. [< X of 'a ] -> 'a, are now implicitly universally quantified (in other words, the example above is now read as 'a 'r. ([< X of 'a ] as 'r) -> 'a). (Florian Angeletti and Gabriel Scherer, review by Jacques Garrigue)

Code Generation And Optimizations

  • #11712, #12258, #12261: s390x / IBM Z multicore support: OCaml & C stack separation; dynamic stack size checks; fiber and effects support. (Aleksei Nikiforov, with help from Vincent Laviron and Xavier Leroy, additional suggestions by Luc Maranget, review by the same and KC Sivaramakrishnan)

Internal/compiler-libs Changes

  • #12119, +#12188, +#12191: mirror type constraints on value binding in the parsetree: the constraint typ in let pat : typ = exp is now directly stored in the value binding node in the parsetree. (Florian Angeletti, review by Richard Eisenberg)

Bug Fixes

  • #11846: Mark rbx as destroyed at C call for Win64 (mingw-w64 and Cygwin64). Reserve the shadow store for the ABI in the c_stack_link struct instead of explictly when calling C functions. This simultaneously reduces the number of stack pointer manipulations and also fixes a bug when calling noalloc functions where the shadow store was not being reserved. (David Allsopp, report by Vesa Karvonen, review by Xavier Leroy and KC Sivaramakrishnan)

  • #12170: fix pthread_geaffinity_np configure check for android (David Allsopp, review by Sébastien Hinderer)

  • #12252: Fix shared library build error on RISC-V. (Edwin Török, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär and Xavier Leroy)

  • #12255, #12256: Handle large signal numbers correctly (Nick Barnes, review by David Allsopp).

  • #12277: ARM64, fix a potential assembler error for very large functions by emitting stack reallocation code before the body of the function. (Xavier Leroy, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan)