I’m pleased to announce the initial release of Alice , a radical, experimental OCaml build system, package manager, and environment manager for Windows , macOS, and Linux. Its goal is to allow anyone to program in OCaml with as little friction as possible. To build your first program with Alice, run: …

Thanks for the pointers. It seems everybody in package management agrees that SQLite is a bad idea. I was just reading about how DNF (fka Yum) moved from XML and SQLite formats to libsolv to both store the metadata and solve the dependencies.

The storage and the query format are two different things. The opam-repository for example is a text-based format. OPAM loads it and stores it in Marshall files as far as I know. Dune stores it in a bare Git repo (and uses LMDB to cache it). You could store the data in a database, but SQLite files …

Alice v0.4.0 is out. The main change is that package manifests now use KDL instead of TOML. See this post for the motivation for this change. There’s a migration guide here .

I’m now waiting for the 0.5.0 version using scfg instead.

Alice now supports parallel builds: Parallel Alice

It’s a bit sad to depend on eio for a build system, especially when the main interest is to use a domain pool. The first thing is that other [1] ( lighter ) solutions exist in the ecosystem and can be used in comparison to eio. dune has already chosen to manage its own scheduler to resolve this issue o…

I’m honestly not too attached to eio, especially after learning it can’t spawn processes on Windows, so maybe I’ll play around with some alternatives.

Cool to see Alice getting closer and closer to a fully-fledged build system @gridbugs :)) In your blog post you wrote: There’s Eio.Fiber.all: val all : (unit -> unit) list -> unit But that won’t work because my fibers compute results What you probably want is Eio.Fiber.List.map – the function…

For a build system, most of the work is done in subprocesses, so domainslib is not appropriate? Even Lwt would make more sense, aside from the monadic contamination pointed out by the author.

That’s still too much, you can get a long way with just using Unix.create_process_env which in turn is wonderfully cross platform.

Announcing the first release of Alice, a radical OCaml build system

Ecosystem

gridbugs February 26, 2026, 4:21am 45

Announcing the release of Alice v0.5.0 which introduces parallel builds.

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Announcing the first release of Alice, a radical OCaml build system

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