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OCaml 5.2.0 - Second Beta

Last week, we merged an update to the compiler-libs "shape" API for querying definition information from the compiler.

Unfortunately, this small change of API breaks compatibility with at least odoc. Generally, we try to avoid this kind of changes during the beta releases of the compiler. However, after discussions we concluded that it will be easier on the long term to fix the API right now in order to avoid multiplying the number of supported versions of the shape API in the various OCaml developer tools .

We have thus released a second beta version of OCaml 5.2.0 to give the time to developer tools to update their 5.2.0 version ahead of the release (see below for the installation instructions).

Beyond this changes of API, the new beta contains three more bug fixes and three documentation updates, which is a good sign in term of stability.

As usual, you can follow the last remaining compatibility slags on the opam readiness for 5.2.0 meta-issue.

If you find any bugs, please report them on OCaml's issue tracker.

Currently, the release is planned for the beginning of May.

If you are interested in full list of features and bug fixes of the new OCaml version, 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:

opam update
opam switch create 5.2.0~beta2

The source code for the beta 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~beta2+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~beta2+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.5.2.0~beta2+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array

All available options can be listed with opam search ocaml-option.

See full changelog

Compiler-libs API Changes

  • #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)

Bug Fixes

  • #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)

Documentation Updates

  • #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)

  • #13066, update OCAMLRUNPARAM documentation for the stack size parameter l (Florian Angeletti, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär, Tim McGilchrist, and Miod Vallat)