The set of new features for the future version 4.14.0 of OCaml has been (finally) stabilized, three months after the release of OCaml 4.13.1. I am thus happy to announce the first alpha release for OCaml 4.14.0 .
This alpha version is here to help fellow hackers join us early in our bug hunting and opam ecosystem fixing fun (see below for the installation instructions). You can see the progress on this front at OCaml 4.14 Release Readiness · Issue #20501 · ocaml/opam-repository · GitHub .
If you find any bugs, please report them here:
Most major OCaml developer tools are already supported with this alpha (from odoc to merlin), thus I expect us to switch to beta releases in the beginning of February. The full release is expected to happen in late February.
This early release will give us time to focus on the release of OCaml 5.0.
If you are interested by the list of new features and the ongoing list of bug fixes, the updated change log for OCaml 4.14.0 is available at:
ocaml/Changes at 4.14 · ocaml/ocaml · GitHub
Happy hacking,
Florian Angeletti for the OCaml team.
Installation instructions
The base compiler can be installed as an opam switch with the following commands
opam update
opam switch create 4.14.0~alpha1 --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git
With opam 2.1, the previous command line can be simplified to
opam update
opam switch create 4.14.0~alpha1
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> --packages=ocaml-variants.4.14.0~alpha1+options,<option_list> --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git
or with opam 2.1:
opam update
opam switch create <switch_name> ocaml-variants.4.14.0~alpha1+options <option_list>
where <option_list>
is a comma separated list of ocaml-option-* packages. For instance, for a flambda and no-flat-float-array switch:
opam switch create 4.14.0~alpha1+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.4.14.0~alpha1+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array
All available options can be listed with opam search ocaml-option
.
If you want to test this version, it is advised to install the alpha opam repository
with
opam repo add alpha git://github.com/kit-ty-kate/opam-alpha-repository.git
This alpha repository contains various fixes in the process of being upstreamed.
The source code for the alpha is also available at these addresses:
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/4.14.0-alpha1.tar.gz
https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-4.14/ocaml-4.14.0~alpha1.tar.gz