OCaml 5.0.0, second beta release

Ecosystem
1

The release of OCaml 5.0.0 is drawing close.

In order to test the most recent bug fixes and to help you update your software
and libraries ahead of the release, we have released a second beta version
of OCaml 5.0.0, (see below for the installation instructions).

If you find any bugs, please report them here:

Issues · ocaml/ocaml · GitHub

Compared to the first beta release, this second beta contains many small internal
standard library fixes, one configuration fix and many small bug fixes.

We also have few updates of the documentation, which introduce two new alerts:
one for the unstable modules Domain and Effect, and another for functions
doing unsynchronized_access to mutable state in the standard library.
Those two alerts are disabled by default, but are available for interested users.

The first release candidate for OCaml 5.0.0 is expected to follow closely this
second beta release.

If you are interested by the ongoing list of bug fixes, the updated change log for OCaml 5.0.0 is available at:

ocaml/Changes at 5.0 · ocaml/ocaml · GitHub

You can also follow the state of the opam ecosystem on

http://check.ocamllabs.io/

A short summary of the changes since the first beta release is also available below.

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 5.0.0~beta2

For previous versions of opam, the switch creation command line is slightly more verbose:

opam update
opam switch create 5.0.0~beta2 --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git

It might be also interesting to check the new support for parallelism by installing the domainslib library with

opam install domainslib

The source code for the beta release is available at these addresses:

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/5.0.0-beta2.tar.gz
https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-5.0/ocaml-5.0.0~beta2.tar.gz

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.5.0.0~beta2+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 5.0.0~beta2+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.5.0.0~beta2+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array

The command line above is slightly more complicated for opam versions anterior to 2.1:

opam update
opam switch create <switch_name> --packages=ocaml-variants.5.0.0~beta2+options,<option_list> --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git

In both cases, all available options can be listed with “opam search ocaml-option”.

Changes since the first beta

Configuration changes

  • #11097: Build native-code compilers on NetBSD/aarch64
    (Kate Deplaix, review by Anil Madhavapeddy)

Bug fixes

  • #10875, +#11731: Add option to allocate fiber stacks and sigaltstacks with
    mmap(MAP_STACK) instead of malloc. This is exposed via a configure
    –enable-mmap-map-stack option, and is enabled by default on OpenBSD where
    it is mandatory.
    (Anil Madhavapeddy, review by Gabriel Scherer, Tom Kelly,
    Michael Hendricks and KC Sivaramakrishnan).

  • #11652: Fix benign off-by-one error in Windows implementation of caml_mem_map.
    (David Allsopp, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #11669, #11704: Fix construction of Effect.Unhandled exceptions in the
    bytecode interpreter.
    (David Allsopp and Xavier Leroy, report by Samuel Hym, review by Xavier Leroy
    and Gabriel Scherer)

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

  • #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)

  • #11662, #11673: fix a memory leak when using Dynlink,
    the bug was only present in development version of OCaml 5.
    (Stephen Dolan, report by Andre Maroneze, 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)

Documentation

  • #11193, #11227: documentation on concurrency safety for mutable data types
    and states in the standard library. A unsynchronized_access alert have been
    added for functions that require user synchronizations on concurrent access.
    The new alert is diabled by default.
    (Florian Angeletti, review by François Pottier and KC Sivaramakrishnan )

  • #11526, add a unstable alert to the Domain and Effect modules.
    The new alert is disabled by default.
    (Florian Angeletti, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär, Daniel Bünzli, and
    Kate Deplaix)

  • #11640: Add Flambda commonly-used options to the ocamlopt manpage
    (Amandine Nangah, review by David Allsopp, Florian Angeletti,
    Sébastien Hinderer, and Vincent Laviron)

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