Two months after the release of OCaml 5.1.1, the set of new features for the future version 5.2.0 of OCaml has been frozen. We are thus happy to announce the first alpha release for OCaml 5.2.0.
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). More information about the whole release process is now available in the compiler repository, and we will try to propagate this information to ocaml.org shortly.
The progresses on stabilising the ecosystem are tracked on the opam readiness for 5.2.0 meta-issue.
The full release is expected around April.
If you find any bugs, please report them on OCaml’s issue tracker.
If you are interested in the ongoing list of new features and bug fixes, the updated change log for OCaml 5.2.0 is available on GitHub.
Installation Instructions
The base compiler can be installed as an opam switch with the following commands
on opam 2.1 and later:
opam update
opam switch create 5.2.0~alpha1
For previous version of opam, the switch creation command line is slightly more verbose:
opam update
opam switch create 5.2.0~alpha1 --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git
The source code for the alpha is also available at these addresses:
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.5.2.0~alpha1+options <option_list>
where option_list is a space separated list of ocaml-option-* packages. For instance, for a flambda and no-flat-float-array switch:
opam switch create 5.2.0~alpha1+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.5.2.0~alpha1+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array
The command line above is slightly more complicated for opam version anterior to 2.1:
opam update
opam switch create <switch_name> --packages=ocaml-variants.5.2.0~alpha1+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.