OCaml 4.14.1 released

Ecosystem
1

We have the pleasure of celebrating the birthday of Oronce Finé by announcing the release of OCaml version 4.14.1.

This release is a collection of safe bug fixes, cherry-picked from the OCaml 5.0.0 release. If you were using OCaml 4.14.0 and cannot yet upgrade to OCaml 5, this release is for you.

The 4.14 branch is expected to receive more backported fixes during the maturation of OCaml 5. Thus don’t hesitate to report any bugs on the OCaml issue tracker.

See the list of changes below for more details.

Installation Instructions

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

opam update
opam switch create 4.14.1

The source code for the release candidate is also directly available on:

Changes in OCaml 4.14.1 (20 December 2022)

Compiler User-Interface and Warnings:

  • #11184, #11670: Stop calling ranlib on created / installed libraries
    (Sébastien Hinderer and Xavier Leroy, review by the same)

Build System:

  • #11370, #11373: Don’t pass CFLAGS to flexlink during configure.
    (David Allsopp, report by William Hu, review by Xavier Leroy and
    Sébastien Hinderer)

  • #11487: Thwart FMA test optimization during configure
    (William Hu, review by David Allsopp and Sébastien Hinderer)

Bug Fixes:

  • #10768, #11340: Fix typechecking regression when combining first class
    modules and GADTs.
    (Jacques Garrigue, report by François Thiré, review by Matthew Ryan)

  • #11204: Fix regression introduced in 4.14.0 that would trigger Warning 17 when
    calling virtual methods introduced by constraining the self type from within
    the class definition.
    (Nicolás Ojeda Bär, review by Leo White)

  • #11263, #11267: caml/{memory,misc}.h: check whether _MSC_VER is defined
    before using it to ensure that the headers can always be used in code which
    turns on -Wundef (or equivalent).
    (David Allsopp and Nicolás Ojeda Bär, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär and
    Sébastien Hinderer)

  • #11314, #11416: fix non-informative error message for module inclusion
    (Florian Angeletti, report by Thierry Martinez, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #11358, #11379: Refactor the initialization of bytecode threading,
    This avoids a “dangling pointer” warning of GCC 12.1.
    (Xavier Leroy, report by Armaël Guéneau, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #11387, module type with constraints no longer crash the compiler in presence
    of both shadowing warnings and the -bin-annot compiler flag.
    (Florian Angeletti, report by Christophe Raffalli, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #11392, #11392: assertion failure with -rectypes and external definitions
    (Gabriel Scherer, review by Florian Angeletti, report by Dmitrii Kosarev)

  • #11417: Fix regression allowing virtual methods in non-virtual classes.
    (Leo White, review by Florian Angeletti)

  • #11468: Fix regression from #10186 (OCaml 4.13) detecting IPv6 on Windows for
    mingw-w64 i686 port.
    (David Allsopp, review by Xavier Leroy and Sébastien Hinderer)

  • #11489, #11496: More prudent deallocation of alternate signal stack
    (Xavier Leroy, report by @rajdakin, review by Florian Angeletti)

  • #11516, #11524: Fix the deprecated_mutable attribute.
    (Chris Casinghino, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär and Florian Angeletti)

  • #11194, #11609: Fix inconsistent type variable names in “unbound type var”
    messages
    (Ulysse Gérard and Florian Angeletti, review Florian Angeletti and
    Gabriel Scherer)

  • #11622: Prevent stack overflow when printing a constructor or record
    mismatch error involving recursive types.
    (Florian Angeletti, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #11732: Ensure that types from packed modules are always generalised
    (Stephen Dolan and Leo White, review by Jacques Garrigue)

  • #11737: Fix segfault condition in Unix.stat under Windows in the presence of
    multiple threads.
    (Marc Lasson, Nicolás Ojeda Bär, review by Gabriel Scherer and David Allsopp)

  • #11776: Extend environment with functor parameters in strengthen_lazy.
    (Chris Casinghino and Luke Maurer, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #11533, #11534: follow synonyms again in #show_module_type
    (this had stopped working in 4.14.0)
    (Gabriel Scherer, review by Jacques Garrigue, report by Yaron Minsky)

  • #11768, #11788: Fix crash at start-up of bytecode programs in
    no-naked-pointers mode caused by wrong initialization of caml_global_data
    (Xavier Leroy, report by Etienne Millon, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #11803, #11808: on x86, the destination of an integer comparison must be
    a register, it cannot be a stack slot.
    (Vincent Laviron, review by Xavier Leroy, report by
    Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias)

13 Likes
2

Why was 4.14.1 released without flexdll 0.42?

3

The PR for updating flexdll is still under review, isn’t it?

4

4.14 will be my choice for a long time because effects and multi-core have little appeal to me.
I install from the GitHub source code https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/4.14.1.zip :camel:

1 Like
5

Sorry, in the run-up with other things I haven’t had a chance to comment on that PR, but it doesn’t do what you think it does. The release of OCaml doesn’t include flexdll anywa, it’s only an optional submodule, assisting those working on the compiler itself

6

@dra27 doesn’t OCaml for Windows - Installation use the flexdll that is submoduled? It seems like it does from my testing. I know esy uses the flexdll that is submoduled because I have a fork that updates it…

7

No, it has a patch which drops the sources in there. However, the other point is that updated to flexdll 0.42 doesn’t magically fix anything - it merely adds support for -l: syntax to allow the selection of static C libraries (which is there for OCaml 5.0).