OCaml 5.2.0 released

octachron · May 13, 2024, 2:34pm

The OCaml team has the pleasure of celebrating the birthday of Inge Lehmann by announcing the
release of OCaml version 5.2.0.

Some of the highlights in OCaml 5.2.0 are:

Re-introduced GC compaction
GC compaction can now be manually triggered by calling Gc.compact () manually.
This is expected to be particularly useful for programs that wish to release memory
to the operating system after a temporary memory-intensive phase.
Restored native backend for POWER 64 bits
With this restored backend, all 64 bits architecture supported in OCaml 4 are
supported bin OCaml 5
Thread sanitizer support
Thread sanitizer is a dynamic data race detector which instrument memory
accesses to detect and explain data races at execution time. Since the
instrumentation is costly (with a 2x to 7x slowdown), it must be enabled with
the ocaml-option-tsan configuration flag. (The reference manual contains
more information on how to use TSAN.)
New Dynarray module
This new standard library module provides a standard implementation for resizeable array,
which is guaranteed to be memory safe even in presence of data races.
New -H flag for hidden include directories
This new flag makes it possible for build tools to split cleanly dependencies
between direct (the dependencies explicitly added by the project) and indirect
dependencies (the dependencies introduced by the direct dependencies) without
the quirks of previous implementations.
Project-wide occurence metadata support for developer tools
When compiling a module with the -bin-annot and -bin-annot-occurrences
flags, the compiler stores in the .cmt file an index of all occurences of
values, types, modules, …
Raw identifiers
To improve OCaml upward-compatibility, there is a new syntax for lowercase
identifiers, let \#if = 0, which works even if the identifier is a keyword
in some OCaml versions. This change has been adopted in OCaml 5.2 in
preparation of the introduction of the effect keyword in OCaml 5.3
Local open in type expressions
Local open are now allowed in type expression: val (+): Int64.(t -> t -> t).

And a lot of incremental changes:

Around 20 new functions in the standard library besides the new Dynarray module
(in the Array, Float, Format, Fun, In_channel, Out_channel, and Random modules )
Many fixes and improvements in the runtime
Many bug fixes

OCaml 5.2.0 is still a somewhat experimental release compared to the OCaml
4.14 branch. In particular

The Windows MSVC port is still unavailable.
Ephemeron performances need to be investigated.
statmemprof is being tested in the developer branch of OCaml.
There are a number of known runtime concurrency or GC performance bugs
(that trigger under rare circumstances).

Since the Windows MSVC port and statmemprof are still missing, the maintenance
support for OCaml 4.14 will be extended until at least the end of the year.

Please report any unexpected behaviours on the OCaml issue tracker and post any questions or comments you might have here on discuss.

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

Installation Instructions

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

opam update
opam switch create 5.2.0

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

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.5.1.0+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+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.5.2.0+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array

OCaml 5.2.0 Changelog (13 May 2024)

(Changes that can break existing programs are marked with a “*”)

Restored backends:

#12276, #12601: native-code compilation for POWER (64 bits, little-endian)
(Xavier Leroy, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan, Anil Madhavapeddy,
and Stephen Dolan)
#12667: extend the latter to POWER 64 bits, big-endian, ELFv2 ABI
(A. Wilcox, review by Xavier Leroy)

Runtime system:

#12193: Re-introduce GC compaction for shared pools
Adds a parallel compactor for the shared pools (which contain major heap
blocks sized less than 128 words). Explicit only for now, on calls to
Gc.compact.
(Sadiq Jaffer, Nick Barnes, review by Anil Madhavapeddy, Damien Doligez,
David Allsopp, Miod Vallat, Artem Pianykh, Stephen Dolan, Mark Shinwell
and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12114: Add ThreadSanitizer support
(Fabrice Buoro and Olivier Nicole, based on an initial work by Anmol Sahoo,
review by Damien Doligez, Sébastien Hinderer, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Luc
Maranget, Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, Gabriel Scherer)
#12850: Update Gc.quick_stat data at the end of major cycles and compaction
This PR adds an additional caml_collect_gc_stats_sample_stw to the major heap
cycling stw. This means that Gc.quick_stat now actually reflects the state of
the heap after a major cycle or compaction.
(Sadiq Jaffer, review by Miod Vallat and Gabriel Scherer)
#12859: Ensure Gc.compact does a full major before the compactor runs
(Sadiq Jaffer, review by Leo White, Mark Shinwell, Gabriel Scherer,
Josh Berdine, David Allsopp and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#10111: Increase the detail of location information for debugging events to
allow the end line number and character offset to be reported.
(David Allsopp, review by Nick Barnes, Enguerrand Decorne and Stephen Dolan)
#10403, #12202: introduce caml_ext_table_add_noexc that does not
raise Out_of_memory exceptions and use it inside the blocking sections
of caml_read_directory. Also, check for overflows in ext table sizes.
(Xavier Leroy, report by Arseniy Alekseyev, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#11332, #12702: make sure Bool_val(v) has type bool in C++
(Xavier Leroy, report by ygrek, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12772, #12787: Avoid using _Bool in public headers for the sake of C++
compatibility
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, report by KC Sivaramakrishnan, review
by Xavier Leroy and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12223: Constify constructors and flags tables in C code. Now these
tables will go in the readonly segment, where they belong.
(Antonin Décimo, review by Gabriel Scherer and Xavier Leroy)
#12234: make instrumented time calculation more thread-safe on macOS.
(Anil Madhavapeddy, review by Daniel Bünzli and Xavier Leroy)
#12235, #12468: introduce and use the CAMLnoret macro as
a lighter alternative to CAMLnoreturn_start / CAMLnoreturn_end.
Implement it so as to conform with C11, C23, C++11, C++17.
(Xavier Leroy and Dhruv Maroo, with help from Antonin Décimo, review by
Gabriel Scherer and David Allsopp)
#12275: caml/stack.h: more abstract macros to describe OCaml stacks and
how to traverse them, supporting more stack layouts.
(Xavier Leroy, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan and Fabrice Buoro)
#12268: deliver Out_of_memory exception if domain creation fails
due to memory resource exhaustion. It was previous always a Failure.
(Anil Madhavapeddy, review by David Allsopp)
#12300, #12314: Discard out_channel buffered data on permanent I/O error
(Xavier Leroy, report by Török Edwin, review by Anil Madhavapeddy
and Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#11386: Simplifications and fixes to multicore systhreads implementation.
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, review by Anil Madhavapeddy and KC
Sivaramakrishnan)
#12875, #12879, #12882: Execute preemptive systhread switching as a
delayed pending action. This ensures that one can reason within the
FFI that no mutation happens on the same domain when allocating on
the OCaml heap from C, consistently with OCaml 4. This also fixes
further bugs with the multicore systhreads implementation.
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, bug reports and suggestion by Mark
Shinwell, review by Nick Barnes and Stephen Dolan)
#12408: Domain.spawn no longer leaks its functional argument for
the whole duration of the children domain lifetime.
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12409: Fix unsafety and deadlocks should an asynchronous exception
arise at specific locations during domain creation and shutdown.
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#11911, #12381: Restore statmemprof functionality in part, with
some API changes in Gc.Memprof.
(Nick Barnes, review by Jacques-Henri Jourdan
and Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni).
#12430: Simplify dynamic bytecode loading in Meta.reify_bytecode
(Stephen Dolan, review by Sébastien Hinderer, Vincent Laviron and Xavier
Leroy)
#12489: Fix an error-handling bug in caml_alloc_sprintf
(Stephen Dolan, report by Chris Casinghino, review by Jeremy Yallop
and Xavier Leroy)
#11307: Finish adapting the implementation of asynchronous actions for
multicore: soundness, liveness, and performance issues.
Do not crash if a signal handler is called from an unregistered C
thread, and other possible soundness issues. Prevent issues where join
on other domains could make the toplevel unresponsible to Ctrl-C. Avoid
needless repeated polling in C code when callbacks cannot run
immediately.
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, review by Enguerrand Decorne, Xavier
Leroy, and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12634: Simplify TSan backtrace bookkeeping upon raise
(Olivier Nicole and Fabrice Buoro, review by Gabriel Scherer)

(breaking change) #12686: Some primitives had the wrong types to be callable from the bytecode
interpreter. Either fix their types, mark them as CAMLexport instead of
CAMLprim, or remove them entirely if no longer used.
(Xavier Leroy, review by David Allsopp)

#12700, continuing #11763 and trying to address #12660:
Use the correct types for primitives when generating the table of primitives
used by ocamlrun.
(Xavier Leroy, motivation, review and improvements by Antonin Décimo)
#12345, #12710: Fix issues with finaliser orphaning at domain termination
(KC Sivaramakrishnan, report by Gabriel Scherer, review by Gabriel Scherer,
Sadiq Jaffer and Fabrice Buoro)
#12599: Refactor Dynlink startup to avoid parsing bytecode sections twice
(Stephen Dolan, review by David Allsopp, Hugo Heuzard, Damien Doligez and
Xavier Leroy)
#12678, #12898: free channel buffers on close rather than on finalization
(Damien Doligez, review by Jan Midtgaard and Gabriel Scherer, report
by Jan Midtgaard)
#12681: Fix TSan false positives due to volatile write handling
(Olivier Nicole, Fabrice Buoro and Anmol Sahoo, review by Luc Maranget,
Gabriel Scherer, Hernan Ponce de Leon and Xavier Leroy)
#12743: Use pthread_sigmask instead of sigprocmask
Updates usage of sigprocmask to pthread_sigmask in otherlibs/unix.
(Max Slater, review by Miod Vallat and Xavier Leroy)
#12769: Unify MSVC and MinGW-w64 code paths, by always using WinAPI
directly.
(David Allsopp, Antonin Décimo, and Samuel Hym, review by Nicolas
Ojeda Bar)
#11911, #12382, #12383: Restore statmemprof functionality in part
(backtrace buffers, per-thread and per-domain data structures,
GC/allocation interface). (Nick Barnes, review by Gabriel Scherer,
Fabrice Buoro, Sadiq Jaffer, Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, and
Jacques-Henri Jourdan).
#12735: Store both ends of the stack chain in continuations
(Leo White, review by Miod Vallat and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12746: Simplify and clean up TSan annotations
(Olivier Nicole, review by Miod Vallat and Fabrice Buoro)
#12809: Add ThreadSanitizer support to FreeBSD/amd64
(Miod Vallat, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12810: Port ThreadSanitizer support to Linux and macOS on arm64
(Miod Vallat, review by Tim McGilchrist)
#12811: Define and use the CAMLthread_local macro for TLS variables.
(Antonin Décimo and Samuel Hym, review by Miod Vallat and Xavier Leroy)
#12814: More detailed failure messages from input_value and Marshal.from_*
(Xavier Leroy, review by Stephen Dolan and Anil Madhavapeddy)
#12815: Correctly format multi-line locations in exception backtraces, in the
style that the compiler driver uses.
(David Allsopp, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12773, #12830, #12834: Rewrite caml_c_thread_(un)register to fix
various bugs.
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, reported by Miod Vallat, suggested by
Hari Hara Naveen S, reviewed by Fabrice Buoro, Gabriel Scherer and
Miod Vallat)
#12876: Port ThreadSanitizer support to Linux on POWER
(Miod Vallat, review by Tim McGilchrist)
#12886: Reinitialize IO mutexes after fork
(Max Slater, review by Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni and Xavier Leroy)
#12907: Port ThreadSanitizer support to Linux on RiscV
(Miod Vallat, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär and Fabrice Buoro)
#12915: Port ThreadSanitizer support to Linux on s390x
(Miod Vallat, review by Tim McGilchrist)
#12934: Fix data races between marking and sweeping functions
(Olivier Nicole, suggested by Stephen Dolan, review by Gabriel Scherer,
Miod Vallat and Damien Doligez)

Language features:

#12295, #12568: Give while true' a polymorphic type, similarly to assert false’
(Jeremy Yallop, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär and Gabriel Scherer,
suggestion by Rodolphe Lepigre and John Whitington)
#12044: Add local module open syntax for types.
```
  module A = struct
    type t = int
    type r = unit
    type s = string
  end

  type example = A.(t * r * s)
```
(Alistair O’Brien, review by Gabriel Scherer, Nicolás Ojeda Bär
and Florian Angeletti)
#11252, RFC 27: Support raw identifier syntax #foo
(Stephen Dolan, review by David Allsopp, Gabriel Scherer and Olivier Nicole)
#12315: Use type annotations from arguments in let rec
(Stephen Dolan, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12375: allow use of [@untagged] for all immediate types like char, bool,
and variant with only constant constructors.
(Christophe Raffalli, review by Gabriel Scherer)

(breaking change) #12502: the compiler now normalizes the newline sequence \r\n to
a single \n character during lexing, to guarantee that the semantics
of newlines in string literals is not modified by Windows tools
transforming \n into \r\n in source files.
Warning 29 [eol-in-string] is not emitted anymore, as the normalization
gives a more robust semantics to newlines in string literals.
(Gabriel Scherer and Damien Doligez, review by Daniel Bünzli, David
Allsopp, Andreas Rossberg, Xavier Leroy, report by Andreas Rossberg)

Standard library:

#11563: Add the Dynarray module to the stdlib. Dynamic arrays are
arrays whose length can be changed by adding or removing elements at
the end, similar to ‘vectors’ in C++ or Rust.
(Gabriel Scherer, Simon Cruanes and Florian Angeletti, review by
Daniel Bünzli, Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, Clément Allain,
Damien Doligez, Wiktor Kuchta and Pieter Goetschalckx)
#12716: Add Format.pp_print_nothing function.
(Léo Andrès, review by Gabriel Scherer and Nicolás Ojeda Bär)

(breaking change) #6732, #12423: Make Buffer.add_substitute surjective and fix its
documentation.
(Damien Doligez, review by Antonin Décimo)
(breaking change) #10775, #12499: Half-precision floating-point elements in Bigarray.
(Anton Yabchinskiy, review by Xavier Leroy and Nicolás Ojeda Bär)

#11517, #12477: Expose pp_infinity in interface of the format module, and
check that margin is less than pp_infinity when setting or checking geometry.
(Janith Petangoda, reported by Simmo Saan, reviewed by Florian Angeletti,
Simmo Saan, Josh Berdine and Gabriel Scherer)
#12217: Add Array.shuffle.
(Daniel Bünzli, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär, David Allsopp and Alain Frisch)
#12212: Add cache-aligned constructor for atomics. The patch ensures that
all allocations (of the right size) in the shared heap are aligned.
(Bartosz Modelski with Gabriel Scherer, Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni,
Xavier Leroy, review by Alain Frisch, Anil Madhavapeddy, Gabriel Scherer,
Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, KC Sivaramakrishnan, Stefan Muenzel,
Xavier Leroy)
#12307: Add BLAKE2b hashing and an MD5 submodule to the Digest module.
(Xavier Leroy, review by Olivier Nicole, Gabriel Scherer, Wiktor Kuchta,
Daniel Bünzli, David Allsopp)
#12365: Add In_channel.input_bigarray, In_channel.really_input_bigarray,
Out_channel.output_bigarray, Unix.read_bigarray, Unix.write_bigarray,
Unix.single_write_bigarray.
(Nicolás Ojeda Bär, review by Jeremy Yallop, Xavier Leroy, Gabriel Scherer,
David Allsopp)
#12455: Add Array.init_matrix, Float.Array.make_matrix,
Float.Array.init_matrix.
(Glen Mével, review by Xavier Leroy, Gabriel Scherer, Jeremy Yallop,
Nicolas Ojeda Bar)

(breaking change) #12455: Array.make_matrix dimx dimy f now raises Invalid_argument
when dimx = 0 && dimy < 0 This was already specified but not enforced.
(Glen Mével, report by Jeremy Yallop, review by Nicolas Ojeda Bar)

#12459: Add Random.int_in_range, Random.int32_in_range,
Random.int64_in_range, Random.nativeint_in_range,
and their counterpart in Random.State.
(Glen Mével and Xavier Leroy, review by Gabriel Scherer, Xavier Leroy,
Florian Angeletti)
#12459: Random: restore compatibility between 32-bit integers (JavaScript)
and 63-bit integers (64-bit OCaml).
For Random.full_int this was guaranteed in 4.14 but wrongly removed in 5.0.
(Xavier Leroy, review by Glen Mével)
#12511: Minor performance improvements and cleanups in the implementation
of modules Int32, Int64, and Nativeint
(Xavier Leroy, review by Gabriel Scherer and Daniel Bünzli)
#12558: Adapt GC alarms for multicore and fix their documentation.
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan
and Gabriel Scherer)
#12625: Remove the Closure module from Obj
(Vincent Laviron, review by Xavier Leroy)
#12758, #12998: Remove the Marshal.Compression flag to the
Marshal.to_* functions. The compilers are still able to use
ZSTD compression for compilation artefacts.
This is a forward port and clean-up of the emergency fix that was introduced
in OCaml 5.1.1 by #12734.
(Xavier Leroy, review by Damien Doligez)
#12784: Fix computation of minor-heap allocation in Gc.counters()
and Gc.allocated_bytes(). (Nick Barnes, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12770: Add Fun.compose.
(Justin Frank, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär, Daniel Bünzli and Jeremy Yallop)
#12845: Add {In,Out}_channel.is_binary_mode as the dual of
set_binary_mode. This function was previously only available in the internal
C API.
(David Allsopp, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär and Xavier Leroy)

Type system:

#12313, #11799: Do not re-build as-pattern type when a ground type annotation
is given. This allows to work around problems with GADTs in as-patterns.
(Jacques Garrigue, report by Leo White, review by Gabriel Scherer)

Code generation and optimizations:

#11239: on x86-64 and RISC-V, reduce alignment of OCaml stacks from 16 to 8.
This reduces stack usage. It’s only C stacks that require 16-alignment.
(Xavier Leroy, review by Gabriel Scherer and Stephen Dolan)
#12311: on POWER, 32-bit FP numbers stored in memory (e.g. in bigarrays)
were not correctly rounded sometimes.
(Xavier Leroy, review by Anil Madhavapeddy and Tim McGilchrist)
#12551, #12608, #12782, #12596: Overhaul of recursive value compilation.
Non-function recursive bindings are now forbidden from Lambda onwards,
and compiled using a new Value_rec_compiler module.
(Vincent Laviron and Lunia Ayanides, review by Gabriel Scherer,
Stefan Muenzel and Nathanaëlle Courant)
#1809, #12181: rewrite compare x y op 0 to x op y when values are integers
(Xavier Clerc, Stefan Muenzel, review by Gabriel Scherer and Vincent Laviron)
#12825: disable common subexpression elimination for atomic loads… again.
(Gabriel Scherer, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan, Xavier Leroy
and Vincent Laviron, report by Vesa Karvonen)

Other libraries:

#12213: Dynlink library, improve legibility of error messages
(Samuel Hym, review by Gabriel Scherer and Nicolás Ojeda Bär)

(breaking change) #12686: Runtime_events library, C API: define
caml_runtime_events_{start,pause,resume} as returning void
instead of value.
(Xavier Leroy, review by David Allsopp)

Compiler user-interface and warnings:

#11989, #12246, RFC 31: New flag, -H, to allow for transitive dependencies
without including them in the initial environment.
(Chris Casinghino, François Bobot, and Gabriel Scherer, review by Leo White
and Stefan Muenzel, RFC by François Bobot)

(breaking change) #10613, #12405: Simplify the values used for the system variable (system: in
ocamlopt -config or the Config.system constant). In particular, s390x and
ppc64 now report “linux” instead of “elf”; all variants of 32-bit ARM on Linux
now report “linux”; OpenBSD now reports “openbsd” instead of “bsd” for 32-bit
ARM; FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD now report the same value for both x86_64 and
x86_32; x86_32 systems matching bsd but not freebsd, netbsd* or openbsd*
are no longer identified (as on x86_64); x86_32 Linux now reports “linux”
instead of “linux_elf”.
(David Allsopp, request by Kate Deplaix, review by Sébastien Hinderer and
Xavier Leroy)

#12247: configure: --disable-ocamldebug can now be used instead
of --disable-debugger (which remains available for compatibility)
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Damien Doligez and Sébastien Hinderer)
#12199: improve the error message for non-overriding inherit!
(Florian Angeletti, review by Jules Aguillon)
#12210: uniform style for inline code in compiler messages
(Florian Angeletti, review by Gabriel Scherer)

(breaking change) #12278, #:12325: Remove the OCAML_FLEXLINK environment variable from the
compiler drivers. This environment variable was previously used as part of the
FlexDLL bootstrap procedure and existed solely for that purpose. Its removal
greatly simplifies both the build system and testsuite machinery.
(David Allsopp, review by Sébastien Hinderer)

#12347: error messages: always report missing polyvariant tags
(Florian Angeletti, report by Tianbo Hao, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12224, specialized error message when trying to apply non-functor
module (e.g module M = Int(Int))
(Florian Angeletti, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12451: Warning 53 (misplaced attributes) now works for all attributes.
(Chris Casinghino, review by Florian Angeletti)
#12622: Give hints about existential types appearing in error messages
(Leo White, review by Gabriel Scherer and Florian Angeletti)
#12671: When a class type parameter or class parameter does not match,
identify which parameter in the error message, instead of saying
“A type parameter” or “A parameter”.
(Stefan Muenzel, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12679: Add more detail to the error message and manual in case of
invalid module type substitutions.
(Stefan Muenzel, review by Gabriel Scherer and Florian Angeletti)
#12750: Display the command executed to extract primitives in
ocamlc -verbose.
(David Allsopp, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#12777: Add details about the actual and expected method types to the method
mismatch error messages.
(Javier Chávarri, review by Gabriel Scherer and Florian Angeletti)

(breaking change) #12942: Fix an line ordering in some module inclusion error messages
(Nick Roberts, review by Florian Angeletti, report by Carl Eastlund)

Manual and documentation:

#12338: clarification of the documentation of process related function in
the unix module regarding the first element of args and shell’s pid.
(Christophe Raffalli, review by Florian Angeletti)
#12473: Document in runtime/memory.c our current understanding of
accesses to the OCaml heap from the C runtime code – the problem
of hybrid programs mixing two memory models.
(Gabriel Scherer and Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, review by Olivier
Nicole and Xavier Leroy)
#12456: Document the incompatibility between effects on the one
hand, and caml_callback and asynchronous callbacks (signal
handlers, finalisers, memprof callbacks…) on the other hand.
(Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12694: Document in runtime/tsan.c the TSan instrumentation choices and the
consequences with regard to the memory model.
(Olivier Nicole, review by Miod Vallat, Gabriel Scherer, Guillaume
Munch-Maccagnoni and Fabrice Buoro)
#12802: Add manual chapter about ThreadSanitizer support
(Olivier Nicole, review by Miod Vallat, Sebastien Hinderer, Fabrice Buoro,
Gabriel Scherer and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12819: Clarify which runtime interactions are allowed in custom ops
(Basile Clément, review by Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni and Xavier Leroy)
#12840: manual: update runtime tracing chapter for custom events (ex #12335)
(Lucas Pluvinage, Sadiq Jaffer and Olivier Nicole, review by Gabriel Scherer,
David Allsopp, Tim McGilchrist and Thomas Leonard)
#13066, update OCAMLRUNPARAM documentation for the stack size parameter l
(Florian Angeletti, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär, Tim McGilchrist, and
Miod Vallat)
#13078: update Format tutorial on structural boxes to mention alignment
questions.
(Edwin Török, review by Florian Angeletti)
#13092: document the existence of the [@@poll error] built-in attribute
(Florian Angeletti, review by Gabriel Scherer)

Tools:

#12340: testsuite: collect known issues with current -short-paths
implementation for existential types
(Florian Angeletti, Samuel Hym, review by Florian Angeletti and Thomas Refis)
#12147: ocamllex: Allow carriage returns at the end of line directives.
(SeungCheol Jung, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#12260: Fix invalid_argument on some external or module aliases in ocamlnat
(Fabian Hemmer, review by Vincent Laviron)
#12185: New script language for ocamltest.
(Damien Doligez with Florian Angeletti, Sébastien Hinderer, Gabriel Scherer,
review by Sébastien Hinderer and Gabriel Scherer)
#12371: ocamltest: fix recursive expansion of variables.
(Antonin Décimo, Damien Doligez, review by Sébastien Hinderer,
Damien Doligez, Gabriel Scherer, and Xavier Leroy)

(breaking change) #12497, #12613: Make ocamlc/ocamlopt fail with an error when no
input files are specified to build an executable.
(Antonin Décimo, review by Sébastien Hinderer)

#12576: ocamldep: various refactors.
(Antonin Décimo, review by Florian Angeletti, Gabriel Scherer, and Léo Andrès)
#12615: ocamldoc: get rid of the odoc_literate and odoc_todo generators.
(Sébaistien Hinderer, review by Gabriel Scherer and Florian Angeletti)
#12624: Use $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS in addition to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME when searching
for init.ml and use this to extend init.ml support to the toplevel when
running on Windows.
(David Allsopp, report by Jonah Beckford, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär and
Antonin Décimo)
#12688: Setting the env variable NO_COLOR with an empty value no longer
has effects. Previously, setting NO_COLOR with any value, including
the empty value, would disable colors (unless OCAML_COLOR is also set).
After this change, the user must set NO_COLOR with an non-empty value
to disable colors. This reflects a specification clarification/change
from the upstream website at https://no-color.org.
(Favonia, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12744: ocamltest: run tests in recursive subdirs more eagerly
(Nick Roberts, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#12901, 12908: ocamllex: add overflow checks to prevent generating incorrect
lexers; use unsigned numbers in the table encoding when possible.
(Vincent Laviron, report by Edwin Török, review by Xavier Leroy)

Internal/compiler-libs changes:

#12508 : Add compiler-side support for project-wide occurrences in Merlin, by
generating index tables of all identifier occurrences. This extra data in .cmt
files is only added when the new flag -bin-annot-occurrences is passed.
(Ulysse Gérard, Nathanaëlle Courant, suggestions by Gabriel Scherer and Thomas
Refis, review by Florian Angeletti, Gabriel Scherer and Thomas Refis)
#12236, #12386, #12391, #12496, #12673: Use syntax as sole determiner of arity
This changes function arity to be based solely on the source program’s
parsetree. Previously, the heuristic for arity had more subtle heuristics
that involved type information about patterns. Function arity is important
because it determines when a pattern match’s effects run and is an input
into the fast path for function application.

This change affects tooling: it changes the function constructs in parsetree
and typedtree.

See Syntactic function arity by stedolan · Pull Request #32 · ocaml/RFCs · GitHub for the original RFC.

(Nick Roberts; review by Richard Eisenberg, Leo White, and Gabriel Scherer;
RFC by Stephen Dolan)
#12639: parsing: Attach a location to the RHS of Ptyp_alias
and improve the ‘alias type mismatch’ error message.
(Jules Aguillon, review by Florian Angeletti)
#12447: Remove 32-bit targets from X86_proc.system
(Masanori Ogino, review by David Allsopp)
#12216, #12248: Prevent reordering of atomic loads during instruction
scheduling. This is for reference, as instruction scheduling is currently
unused in OCaml 5.
(Xavier Leroy, report by Luc Maranget and KC Sivaramakrishnan,
review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#12025: Split Typecore.unify_pat_types into two
to avoid unnecessary references to the environment in type_pat
(Jacques Garrigue and Takafumi Saikawa, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12031: Use dedicated types to represent names of compilation units
and predefined exceptions in CMO files.
(Sébastien Hinderer, review by Florian Angeletti, Thomas Refis,
Gabriel Scherer, Vincent Laviron, Pierre Chambart, Luke Maurer,
Hugo Heuzard, Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez)
#12109: Pack parameters to unification in unification_environment
(Takafumi Saikawa and Jacques Garrigue, review by Richard Eisenberg)
#12331, #12361: Pack the unification data for pattern checking in Typecore
(Takafumi Saikawa and Jacques Garrigue,
review by Gabriel Scherer, Thomas Refis and Florian Angeletti)
#12229: Remove global mutable state for typechecking patterns
in Typecore in favor of local mutable state.
(Nick Roberts, review by Takafumi Saikawa)
#12542: Minor bugfix to #12236: restore dropped call to instance
(Nick Roberts, review by Jacques Garrigue)
#12242: Move the computation of stack frame parameters to a separate
Stackframe module, and save the parameters in the results of the
Linearize pass
(Xavier Leroy, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan and Mark Shinwell)
#12442: document jump summaries in the pattern-matching compiler
(Gabriel Scherer and Thomas Refis, review by Florian Angeletti
and Vincent Laviron)
#12446, #12792: remove the hooks machinery around channel locking
in runtime/io.c
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Xavier Leroy)
#12389, #12544, #12984, #12987: centralize the handling of metadata for
compilation units and artifacts in preparation for better unicode support for
OCaml source files.
(Florian Angeletti, review by Vincent Laviron and Gabriel Scherer)
#12532, #12553: improve readability of the pattern-matching debug output
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Thomas Refis)
#12537: Use C11/C++11 standard static assertion.
(Antonin Décimo, review by Sebastien Hinderer, Xavier Leroy,
and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12169: runtime: document and enforce naming conventions around STW sections.
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Enguerrand Decorne, Miod Vallat, B. Szilvasy
and Nick Barnes, report by KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12669 : Clean up some global state handling in schedgen
(Stefan Muenzel, review by Miod Vallat and Gabriel Scherer)
#12640: Make the module separator used in symbol names configurable
(Miod Vallat, review by Hugo Heuzard and Xavier Leroy)
#12691 : Clean up Ctype.expand_abbrev_gen and
rename Env.add_local_type to add_local_constraint
(Takafumi Saikawa and Jacques Garrigue, review by Florian Angeletti)
#12786 : Clean up the algorithm of Ctype.limited_generalize
(Takafumi Saikawa and Jacques Garrigue, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#10691: Ast_mapper, Ast_iterator: add functions directive_argument,
toplevel_directive and toplevel_phrase.
(Guillaume Petiot, review by Gabriel Scherer and Kate Deplaix)
#12764: Move all installable headers in caml/ sub-directories.
(Antonin Décimo, review by Gabriel Scherer and David Allsopp)
#12914: Slightly change the s390x assembly dialect in order to build with
Clang’s integrated assembler.
(Miod Vallat, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#13001: do not read_back entire shapes to get aliases’ uids when building the
usages index
(Ulysse Gérard, review by Gabriel Scherer and Nathanaëlle Courant)

Build system:

#12198, #12321, #12586, #12616, #12706, #13048: continue the merge of the
sub-makefiles into the root Makefile started with #11243, #11248,
#11268, #11420 and #11675.
(Sébastien Hinderer, review by David Allsopp and Florian Angeletti)
#12569, #12570: remove ‘otherlibraries’ as a prerequisite for ‘runtop’;
use ‘runtop-with-otherlibs’ to use a library from otherlibs/
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Sébastien Hinderer, suggestion by David Allsopp)
#12652: Make magic numbers easier to bump and duplicate.
(Sébastien Hinderer, review by Antonin Décimo, David Allsopp and Florian
Angeletti)

(breaking change) #12751: --with-target-bindir configure option implemented. This option
refers to the location of the runtime binaries on the target system for a
cross-compiler and is embedded in executables produced by ocamlc. It does
not affect the bytecode executables installed as part of the build. The old
mechanism make TARGET_BINDIR=.. no longer works.
(David Allsopp, review by Damien Doligez, Xavier Leroy and Olivier Nicole)

#12768, #13030: Detect mingw-w64 coupling with GCC or LLVM, detect clang-cl,
and fix C compiler feature detection on macOS.
(Antonin Décimo, review by Miod Vallat and Sébastien Hinderer)

Bug fixes:

#10652, #12720: fix evaluation order in presence of optional arguments
(Jacques Garrigue, report by Leo White, review by Vincent Laviron)
#12595, #12597: fix a race in caml_clear_gc_stats_sample
(Gabriel Scherer, review by B. Szilvasy, report by B. Szilvasy)
#12580: Fix location of alias pattern variables.
(Chris Casinghino, review Gabriel Scherer, report by Milo Davis)
#12583: Add a closing event for when EV_MAJOR_EPHE_MARK is complete
(Sudha Parimala, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12566: caml_output_value_to_malloc wrongly uses caml_stat_alloc
instead of malloc since 4.06, breaking (in pooled mode) user code
that uses free on the result. Symmetrically,
caml_input_value_from_malloc should use free.
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Xavier Leroy and Enguerrand Decorne,
report by Ido Yariv)
#12490: Unix: protect the popen_processes hashtable with a mutex
(Gabriel Scherer, report by Olivier Nicole, review by Xavier Leroy)
#11931: Fix tricky typing bug with type substitutions
(Stephen Dolan, review by Leo White and Jacques Garrigue)
#12037, #12171: Fix get_extern_state potential NULL dereference.
(Alexander Skvortsov, report by Török Edwin,
design by Gabriel Scherer, Xavier Leroy)
#12635: Fix get_intern_state potential NULL dereference.
(Antonin Décimo, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12032, #12059: Bug fixes related to compilation of recursive definitions
(Vincent Laviron, report by Victoire Noizet, review by Gabriel Scherer)

(breaking change) #12145: Loopy constraints cause ocamlc to loop.
Fixed by completely removing the call to update_type in
Typedecl.transl_type_decl, as the expansion is already checked by
check_regularity. As a result, recursion is more polymorphic,
which may cause some (essentially wrong) type declarations to have
unbound type variables, and some constraints unrelated to the concrete
type to be ignored (see tests/typing-misc/constraints.ml).
(Jacques Garrigue, report by Richard Eisenberg, review by Leo White)

#12207, #12222: Make closure computation linear in the number of recursive
functions instead of quadratic
(Vincent Laviron, report by François Pottier, review by Nathanaëlle Courant
and Gabriel Scherer)
#11040, #12591: fix a data race in major_gc.c
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni
and KC Sivaramakrishnan, report by Sadiq Jaffer)
#12238, #12403, #12698: read input files in one go to avoid source reprinting
issues.
(Gabriel Scherer, report by Mike Spivey and Vincent Laviron, review by
Nicolás Ojeda Bär, Xavier Leroy and Jeremy Yallop)
#12334, #12368: Bad error message with mutually recursive abbreviations
(Jacques Garrigue, report by Richard Eisenberg, review by Gabriel Scherer
and Richard Eisenberg)
#12401: seek_in and seek_out sometimes returned normally when given
negative offsets, instead of failing. Now both functions should consistently
raise Sys_error in this case.
(Nicolás Ojeda Bär, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12267: Fix stack alignment computation
(Miod Vallat, report by Jan Midtgaard, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12395, #12404: Fix thread-unsafety in the fallback implementation of
Unix.create_process (the one used when posix_spawnp is unavailable)
(Xavier Leroy, report by Chris Vine, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#12949: open shadowing mistriggers
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Florian Angeletti, report by Andreas Rossberg)
#12526: Honor ocaml.inline always attribute on functions with
optional arguments and default values in the Closure backend
(Alain Frisch, review by Vincent Laviron)
#12677, #12889: make Domain.DLS thread-safe
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Olivier Nicole and Damien Doligez,
report by Vesa Karvonen)
#12561: Fix crash when combining TSan and frame-pointers
(Fabrice Buoro and Olivier Nicole, report by Jan Midtgaard, review by Miod
Vallat and Gabriel Scherer)
#12482: Rework bounds checking code in the POWER backend
(Miod Vallat and Xavier Leroy, report by Jan Midtgaard, review by
KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12528, #12703: Avoid pointer arithmetic overflow in Tag_val macro
(very likely harmless, but can trigger alarms)
(Xavier Leroy, report by Sam Goldman, review by Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni)
#12593: TSan should handle Effect.Unhandled correctly
(Fabrice Buoro and Olivier Nicole, report by Jan Midtgaard and Miod Vallat,
review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12684: fix locations filename in AST produced by the -pp option
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Florian Angeletti)
#12714: check whether macros are defined before using them to ensure
that the headers can always be used in code which turns on -Wundef
(or equivalent).
(Antonin Décimo, review by Miod Vallat, Gabriel Scherer,
Xavier Leroy, and David Allsopp)
#12726: fix segmentation fault under Windows when executing a bytecode file if
the runtime (ocamlrun.exe) cannot be found.
(Vadim Zborovskii, Nicolás Ojeda Bär, report by Vadim Zborovskii, review by
David Allsopp)
#12727, #12730: fix bug with value let-rec and labelled applications
(Vincent Laviron, review by Gabriel Scherer)

(breaking change) #12751: Always keep within the 128 character limit for shebang lines. Previous
fix in #8622 handled building the compiler with a long prefix; this patch
extends this to the bytecode executables emitted by that compiler.
(David Allsopp, review by Damien Doligez, Xavier Leroy and Olivier Nicole)

#12755: Fix data race on global pools arrays of pool_freelist
(Fabrice Buoro and Olivier Nicole, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12796, #12801: Fix memory corruption in caml_unix_alloc_sockaddr
(Thomas Leonard, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#12737: Fix data races in minor_gc.c and caml_natdynlink_open
(Olivier Nicole, review by Stefan Muenzel, Miod Vallat, Guillaume
Munch-Maccagnoni, Gabriel Scherer and Xavier Leroy)
#12831: Fix call to caml_call_realloc_stack for s390x in PIC mode
(Vincent Laviron, report by Jerry James, review by Miod Vallat)

(breaking change) #12837: Show non-generalizable type parameters in type definitions
Changes type of type parameters in outcometree.mli.
(Jacques Garrigue, review by Richard Eisenberg)

#12897: fix locking bugs in Runtime_events
(Gabriel Scherer and Thomas Leonard,
review by Olivier Nicole, Vincent Laviron and Damien Doligez,
report by Thomas Leonard)
#12851: Fix race between runtime events teardown and event emission
(Olivier Nicole, review by Miod Vallat and Gabriel Scherer)
#12860: Fix an assertion that wasn’t taking into account the possibility of an
ephemeron pointing at static data.
(Mark Shinwell, review by Gabriel Scherer and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#12861: Fix a possible crash in the threads library.
(Mark Shinwell, review by Gabriel Scherer and KC Sivaramakrishnan)
#11040, #12894: Silence false data race observed between caml_shared_try_alloc
and oldify. Introduces macros to call tsan annotations which help annotate
a ``happens before’’ relationship.
(Hari Hara Naveen S and Olivier Nicole,
review by Gabriel Scherer and Miod Vallat)
#12958: Fix tail-modulo-cons compilation of try-with, && and ||
expressions.
(Gabriel Scherer and Nicolás Ojeda Bär, report by Sylvain Boilard, review by
Gabriel Scherer)
#12919: Fix register corruption in caml_callback2_asm on s390x.
(Miod Vallat, review by Gabriel Scherer)
#12924, #12930: Rework package constraint checking to improve interaction with
immediacy
(Chris Casinghino and Florian Angeletti, review by Florian Angeletti and
Richard Eisenberg)
#12969: Fix a data race in caml_darken_cont
(Fabrice Buoro and Olivier Nicole, review by Gabriel Scherer and Miod Vallat)
#12971, #12974: fix an uncaught Ctype.Escape exception on some
invalid programs forming recursive types.
(Gabriel Scherer, review by Florian Angeletti, report by Neven Villani)
#13019: Remove linking instructions for the Unix library from threads.cma
(this was done for threads.cmxa in OCaml 3.11). Eliminates warnings from
new lld when using threads.cma of duplicated libraries.
(David Allsopp, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#13058: Add TSan instrumentation to caml_call_gc(), since it may raise
exceptions.
(Fabrice Buoro, Olivier Nicole, Gabriel Scherer and Miod Vallat)
#13079: Save and restore frame pointer across Iextcall on ARM64
(Tim McGilchrist, review by KC Sivaramakrishnan and Miod Vallat)
#13094: Fix undefined behavior of left-shifting a negative number.
(Antonin Décimo, review by Miod Vallat and Nicolás Ojeda Bär)
#13130: minor fixes to pprintast for raw identifiers and local module open
syntax for types.
(Chet Murthy, review by Gabriel Scherer)

otini · May 13, 2024, 4:09pm

Thanks for all your work on the release! Very excited by Dynarray, and local open in types which I’ve been waiting for for a while. And TSan of course, but I’m biased here.

sid · May 13, 2024, 6:06pm

Really excited about the relentless improvement in OCaml.

If I’m not wrong this is the integration with merlin that has been in the works for a very long time and been through many iterations. It’s great to see this finally cross the finish line.

The problem is that whenever I’ve looked at this, it been in an incomplete state.

Can anybody tell me if I can use occurences with ocaml-lsp ? How can I use this ? Does this have dune integration ?

A very simple “How To” on getting project occurences working in your editor would be very welcome.

vds · May 14, 2024, 12:06pm

Hi @sid, now that OCaml 5.2 is here we are working hard to release versions of the involved tools that enable developers to use the feature. Merlin and LSP should be released soon and the Dune rules are under review.

Once everything is released I will make an announce here with the usage instructions.

XVilka · May 22, 2024, 1:28pm

Who usually packages OCaml for Homebrew? Seems it there is no activity to update it.

Leonidas · May 23, 2024, 8:27am

Looking at the history there is no usual packager, so it might be you if you’re so inclined. Brew doesn’t have the same maintainer structure as e.g. Debian has.

XVilka · May 25, 2024, 12:07pm

Ok, it’s WIP: ocaml 5.2.0 by XVilka · Pull Request #172795 · Homebrew/homebrew-core · GitHub

XVilka · June 6, 2024, 8:30am

Ok, it’s merged now. The only problematic remains hyperkit, of which I have exactly zero knowledge. So if anyone knows who would want to fix it in macOS/Homebrew, please ping them. Apparently, it was broken even before OCaml 5.2.0:

 /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/vendor/portable-ruby/3.3.2/bin/bundle clean
  ==> Testing hyperkit
  ==> /usr/local/Cellar/hyperkit/0.20210107_1/bin/hyperkit -v 2>&1
  /usr/bin/env tar --extract --no-same-owner --file /Users/brew/Library/Caches/Homebrew/downloads/840a6f58d851f8ac4dbfee434980e81b172cdb88593b1f5bfacf1fb074f981c5--tinycorelinux_8.x.tar.gz --directory /private/tmp/homebrew-unpack20240604-96003-ogq8uu
  /usr/bin/env cp -pR /private/tmp/homebrew-unpack20240604-96003-ogq8uu/tinycorelinux_8.x/. /private/tmp/hyperkit--tinycorelinux-20240604-96003-mm92c8/tinycorelinux_8.x
  ==> expect test_hyperkit.exp
  spawn /usr/local/Cellar/hyperkit/0.20210107_1/bin/hyperkit -A -m 512M -s 0:0,hostbridge -s 31,lpc -l com1,stdio -f kexec,./vmlinuz,./initrd.gz,earlyprintk=serial console=ttyS0
  
  Using fd 8 for I/O notifications
  
  send: spawn id exp6 not open
      while executing
  "send "sudo halt\r\n""
      (file "test_hyperkit.exp" line 17)
  
  Error: hyperkit: failed
  Error: hyperkit: failed
  An exception occurred within a child process:
    BuildError: Failed executing: expect test_hyperkit.exp

hyperkit has been broken for a while – let’s see how the other tests go.

Here is the formula source: Formula/h/hyperkit.rb

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