OCaml 4.09.0 released

Ecosystem
1

The OCaml team have the pleasure of celebrating the birth of James Waddell Alexander II
by announcing the release of OCaml version 4.09.0 .

Some of the highlights of this new 4.09 release are:

  • New optimisations, in particular for affine functions in matches, for instance
    type t = A | B | C
    let affine = function
      | A -> 4
      | B -> 3
      | C -> 2
  • The graphics library was moved out of the compiler distribution.
  • The vmthread library was removed.
  • Support for compiler plugins was removed.
  • Many bug fixes.

The full list of change can be found in the changelog below.

It is available as a set of OPAM switches, and as a source download here:

https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-4.09/

Happy hacking.

Changes

This is the changelog .

Runtime system:

  • (breaking change) #1725, #2279: Deprecate Obj.set_tag and Obj.truncate
    (Stephen Dolan, review by Gabriel Scherer, Damien Doligez and Xavier Leroy)

  • (breaking change) #2240: Constify “identifier” in struct custom_operations
    (Cedric Cellier, review by Xavier Leroy)

  • (breaking change) #2293: Constify “caml_named_value”
    (Stephen Dolan, review by Xavier Leroy)

  • #8787, #8788: avoid integer overflow in caml_output_value_to_bytes
    (Jeremy Yallop, report by Marcello Seri)

  • #2075, #7729: rename _T macro used to support Unicode in the (Windows) runtime
    in order to avoid compiler warning
    (Nicolás Ojeda Bär, review by Gabriel Scherer and David Allsopp)

  • #2250: Remove extra integer sign-extension in compare functions
    (Stefan Muenzel, review by Xavier Leroy)

  • #8607: Remove obsolete macros for pre-2002 MSVC support
    (Stephen Dolan, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär and David Allsopp)

  • #8656: Fix a bug in [caml_modify_generational_global_root]
    (Jacques-Henri Jourdan, review by Gabriel Scherer)

Standard library:

  • #2262: take precision (.) and flags (’+’ and ’ ') into account
    in printf %F
    (Pierre Roux, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #6148, #8596: optimize some buffer operations
    (Damien Doligez, reports by John Whitington and Alain Frisch,
    review by Jeremy Yallop and Gabriel Scherer)

Other libraries:

  • (breaking change) #2318: Delete the graphics library. This library is now available
    as a separate “graphics” package in opam. Its new home is:
    https://github.com/ocaml/graphics
    (Jérémie Dimino, review by Nicolas Ojeda Bar, Xavier Leroy and
    SĂ©bastien Hinderer)

  • (breaking change) #2289: Delete the vmthreads library. This library was deprecated in 4.08.0.
    (Jérémie Dimino)

  • #2112: Fix Thread.yield unfairness with busy threads yielding to each
    other.
    (Andrew Hunter, review by Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Spiros Eliopoulos, Stephen
    Weeks, & Mark Shinwell)

  • #7903, #2306: Make Thread.delay interruptible by signals again
    (Xavier Leroy, review by Jacques-Henri Jourdan and Edwin Török)

  • #2248: Unix alloc_sockaddr: Fix read of uninitialized memory for an
    unbound Unix socket. Add support for receiving abstract (Linux) socket paths.
    (Tim Cuthbertson, review by Sébastien Hinderer and Jérémie Dimino)

Compiler user-interface and warnings:

  • (breaking change) #2276: Remove support for compiler plugins and hooks (also adds
    [Dynlink.unsafe_get_global_value])
    (Mark Shinwell, Xavier Clerc, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär,
    Florian Angeletti, David Allsopp and Xavier Leroy)
  • #2301: Hint on type error on int literal
    (Jules Aguillon, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär , Florian Angeletti,
    Gabriel Scherer and Armaël Guéneau)
  • (breaking change) #2314: Remove support for gprof profiling.
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Xavier Clerc and Stephen Dolan)

  • #2190: fix pretty printing (using Pprintast) of “lazy …” patterns and
    “fun (type t) -> …” expressions.
    (Nicolás Ojeda Bär, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #2277: Use newtype names as type variable names
    The inferred type of (fun (type t) (x : t) -> x)
    is now printed as ('t -> 't) rather than ('a -> 'a).
    (Matthew Ryan)

  • #2309: New options -with-runtime and -without-runtime in ocamlopt/ocamlc
    that control the inclusion of the runtime system in the generated program.
    (Lucas Pluvinage, review by Daniel BĂĽnzli, Damien Doligez, David Allsopp
    and Florian Angeletti)

  • #3819, #8546 more explanations and tests for illegal permutation
    (Florian Angeletti, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #8537: fix the -runtime-variant option for bytecode
    (Damien Doligez, review by David Allsopp)

  • #8541: Correctly print multi-lines locations
    (Louis Roché, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #8579: Better error message for private constructors
    of an extensible variant type
    (Guillaume Bury, review by many fine eyes)

Code generation and optimizations:

  • #2278: Remove native code generation support for 32-bit Intel macOS,
    iOS and other Darwin targets.
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Nicolas Ojeda Bar and Xavier Leroy)

  • #8547: Optimize matches that are an affine function of the input.
    (Stefan Muenzel, review by Alain Frisch, Gabriel Scherer)

  • #1904, #7931: Add FreeBSD/aarch64 support
    (Greg V, review by SĂ©bastien Hinderer, Stephen Dolan, Damien Doligez
    and Xavier Leroy)

  • #8507: Shorten symbol names of anonymous functions in Flambda mode
    (the directory portions are now hidden)
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)

  • #8681, #8699, #8712: Fix code generation with nested let rec of functions.
    (Stephen Dolan, Leo White, Gabriel Scherer and Pierre Chambart,
    review by Gabriel Scherer, reports by Alexey Solovyev and Jonathan French)

Manual and documentation:

  • #7584, #8538: Document .cmt* files in the “overview” of ocaml{c,opt}
    (Oxana Kostikova, rewiew by Florian Angeletti)

  • #8757: Rename Pervasives to Stdlib in core library documentation.
    (Ian Zimmerman, review by David Allsopp)

  • #8515: manual, precise constraints on reexported types
    (Florian Angeletti, review by Gabriel Scherer)

Tools:

  • #2221: ocamldep will now correctly allow a .ml file in an include directory
    that appears first in the search order to shadow a .mli appearing in a later
    include directory.
    (Nicolás Ojeda Bär, review by Florian Angeletti)

Internal/compiler-libs changes:

  • #1579: Add a separate types for clambda primitives
    (Pierre Chambart, review by Vincent Laviron and Mark Shinwell)

  • #1965: remove loop constructors in Cmm and Mach
    (Vincent Laviron)

  • #1973: fix compilation of catches with multiple handlers
    (Vincent Laviron)

  • #2228, #8545: refactoring the handling of .cmi files
    by moving the logic from Env to a new module Persistent_env
    (Gabriel Scherer, review by Jérémie Dimino and Thomas Refis)

  • #2229: Env: remove prefix_idents cache
    (Thomas Refis, review by Frédéric Bour and Gabriel Scherer)

  • #2237, #8582: Reorder linearisation of Trywith to avoid a call instruction
    (Vincent Laviron and Greta Yorsh, additional review by Mark Shinwell;
    fix in #8582 by Mark Shinwell, Xavier Leroy and Anil Madhavapeddy)

  • #2265: Add bytecomp/opcodes.mli
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Nicolas Ojeda Bar)

  • #2268: Improve packing mechanism used for building compilerlibs modules
    into the Dynlink libraries
    (Mark Shinwell, Stephen Dolan, review by David Allsopp)

  • #2280: Don’t make more Clambda constants after starting Cmmgen
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Vincent Laviron)

  • #2281: Move some middle-end files around
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Pierre Chambart and Vincent Laviron)

  • #2283: Add [is_prefix] and [find_and_chop_longest_common_prefix] to
    [Misc.Stdlib.List]
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Alain Frisch and Stephen Dolan)

  • #2284: Add various utility functions to [Misc] and remove functions
    from [Misc.Stdlib.Option] that are now in [Stdlib.Option]
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Thomas Refis)

  • #2286: Functorise [Consistbl]
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Gabriel Radanne)

  • #2291: Add [Compute_ranges] pass
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Vincent Laviron)

  • #2292: Add [Proc.frame_required] and [Proc.prologue_required].
    Move tail recursion label creation to [Linearize]. Correctly position
    [Lprologue] relative to [Iname_for_debugger] operations.
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Vincent Laviron)

  • #2308: More debugging information on [Cmm] terms
    (Mark Shinwell, review by Stephen Dolan)

  • #7878, #8542: Replaced TypedtreeIter with tast_iterator
    (Isaac “Izzy” Avram, review by Gabriel Scherer and Nicolás Ojeda Bär)

  • #8598: Replace “not is_nonexpansive” by “maybe_expansive”.
    (Thomas Refis, review by David Allsopp, Florian Angeletti, Gabriel Radanne,
    Gabriel Scherer and Xavier Leroy)

Compiler distribution build system:

  • #2267: merge generation of header programs, also fixing parallel build on
    Cygwin.
    (David Allsopp, review by SĂ©bastien Hinderer)

  • #8514: Use boot/ocamlc.opt for building, if available.
    (Stephen Dolan, review by Gabriel Scherer)

Bug fixes:

  • #8864, #8865: Fix native compilation of left shift by (word_size - 1)
    (Vincent Laviron, report by Murilo Giacometti Rocha, review by Xavier Leroy)

  • #2296: Fix parsing of hexadecimal floats with underscores in the exponent.
    (Hugo Heuzard and Xavier Leroy, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #8800: Fix soundness bug in extension constructor inclusion
    (Leo White, review by Jacques Garrigue)

  • #8848: Fix x86 stack probe CFI information in caml_c_call and
    caml_call_gc
    (Tom Kelly, review by Xavier Leroy)

  • #7156, #8594: make top level use custom printers if they are available
    (Andrew Litteken, report by Martin Jambon, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär,
    Thomas Refis, Armaël Guéneau, Gabriel Scherer, David Allsopp)

  • #3249: ocamlmklib should reject .cmxa files
    (Xavier Leroy)

  • #7937, #2287: fix uncaught Unify exception when looking for type
    declaration
    (Florian Angeletti, review by Jacques Garrigue)

  • #8610, #8613: toplevel printing, consistent deduplicated name for types
    (Florian Angeletti, review by Thomas Refis and Gabriel Scherer,
    reported by Xavier Clerc)

  • #8635, #8636: Fix a bad side-effect of the -allow-approx option of
    ocamldep. It used to turn some errors into successes
    (Jérémie Dimino)

  • #8701, #8725: Variance of constrained parameters causes principality issues
    (Jacques Garrigue, report by Leo White, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #8777(partial): fix position information in some polymorphic variant
    error messages about missing tags
    (Florian Angeletti, review by Thomas Refis)

  • #8779, more cautious variance computation to avoid missing cmis
    (Florian Angeletti, report by Antonio Nuno Monteiro, review by Leo White)

  • #8810: Env.lookup_module: don’t allow creating loops
    (Thomas Refis, report by Leo White, review by Jacques Garrigue)

  • #8862, #8871: subst: preserve scopes
    (Thomas Refis, report by Leo White, review by Jacques Garrigue)

  • #8921, #8924: Fix stack overflow with Flambda
    (Vincent Laviron, review by Pierre Chambart and Leo White,
    report by Aleksandr Kuzmenko)

  • #8944: Fix “open struct … end” on clambda backend
    (Thomas Refis, review by Leo White, report by Damon Wang and Mark Shinwell)

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