Patches for solaris and friends are reinstated (thanks jperkin@)
Also thanks to he@ for testing on powerpc and arm
Highlights for 4.10.0:
* A new best-fit allocator for the major heap which reducing both GC cost
and memory usage.
* Immutable strings are now enforced at configuration time
* User-defined indexing operators for multidimensional arrays
* Miscellaneous improvements to the manual
* A more precise exhaustiveness check for GADTs
* Many bug fixes
Highlights for 4.11.0:
* Statmemprof: a new statistical memory profiler
* A new instrumented runtime that logs runtime statistics in a standard
format
* A native backend for the RISC-V architecture
* Improved backtraces that refer to function names
* Suppport for recursive and yet unboxed types
* A quoted extension syntax for ppxs.
* Many quality of life improvements
* Many bug fixes.
4.11.1 is a bugfix release. Full details in the CHANGELOG included with
the distribution.
Highlights of this release are:
* new optimisations, in particular for affine functions in matches;
* the graphics library was moved out of the main distribution;
* the vmthread library was removed;
* support for compiler plugins was removed;
* many bug fixes.
For more details see the Changes file in the distribution.
4.08.1 is a bugfix release, fixing compilation failures in presence of the
-pack option, and dynlinking failures.
Highlights in 4.08.0 are:
* Binding operators (let*, let+, and*, etc). They can be used to
streamline monadic code.
* open now applies to arbitrary module expression in structures and to
applicative paths in signatures.
* A new notion of (user-defined) "alerts" generalizes the deprecated
warning.
* New modules in the standard library: Fun, Bool, Int, Option, Result.
* A significant number of new functions in Float, including FMA support,
and a new Float.Array submodule.
* Source highlighting for errors and warnings in batch mode.
* Many error messages were improved.
* Improved AFL instrumentation for objects and lazy values.
also upstream changelog):
Language features:
- Attributes and extension nodes
- Generative functors
- Module aliases
* Alternative syntax for string literals {id|...|id} (can break comments)
- Separation between read-only strings (type string) and read-write byte
sequences (type bytes). Activated by command-line option -safe-string.
Build system for the OCaml distribution:
- Use -bin-annot when building.
- Use GNU make instead of portable makefiles.
- Updated build instructions for 32-bit Mac OS X on Intel hardware.
Shedding weight:
* Removed Camlp4 from the distribution, now available as third-party software.
* Removed Labltk from the distribution, now available as a third-party library.
Type system:
* Keep typing of pattern cases independent in principal mode
- Allow opening a first-class module or applying a generative functor
in the body of a generative functor. Allow it also in the body of
an applicative functor if no types are created
* Module aliases are now typed in a specific way, which remembers their
identity. In particular this changes the signature inferred by
"module type of"
- Slight change in the criterion to distinguish private
abbreviations and private row types: create a private abbreviation for
closed objects and fixed polymorphic variants.
* Compare first class module types structurally rather than
nominally. Value subtyping allows module subtyping as long as the internal
representation is unchanged.
Compilers:
- More aggressive constant propagation, including float and
int32/int64/nativeint arithmetic. Constant propagation for floats
can be turned off with option -no-float-const-prop, for codes that
change FP rounding modes at run-time.
- New back-end optimization pass: common subexpression elimination (CSE).
(Reuses results of previous computations instead of recomputing them.)
- New back-end optimization pass: dead code elimination.
(Removes arithmetic and load instructions whose results are unused.)
- Optimization of sequences of string patterns
- Experimental native code generator for AArch64 (ARM 64 bits)
- Optimization of integer division and modulus by constant divisors
- Add "-open" command line flag for opening a single module before typing
* "-o" now sets module name to the output file name up to the first "."
(it also applies when "-o" is not given, i.e. the module name is then
the input file name up to the first ".")
* better sharing of structured constants
- new flag to keep locations in cmi files
- issue warning 3 when referring to a value marked with
the [@@ocaml.deprecated] attribute
- a new format implementation based on GADTs
* Constant exception constructors no longer allocate
- avoid unnecessary boxing in let
- Better compilation of optional arguments with default values
- ocamlopt -opaque option for incremental native compilation
Toplevel interactive system:
- New "#show_*" directives
Runtime system:
- New configure option "-no-naked-pointers" to improve performance by
avoiding page table tests during block darkening and the marking phase
of the major GC. In this mode, all out-of-heap pointers must point at
things that look like OCaml values: in particular they must have a valid
header. The colour of said headers should be black.
- Fixed bug in native code version of [caml_raise_with_string] that could
potentially lead to heap corruption.
- Blocks initialized by [CAMLlocal*] and [caml_alloc] are now filled with
[Val_unit] rather than zero.
- Fixed a major performance problem on large heaps (~1GB) by making heap
increments proportional to heap size by default
- Structural equality treats exception specifically
- efficient comparison/indexing of exceptions
- avoid using unsafe C library functions (strcpy, strcat, sprintf)
- An ISO C99-compliant C compiler and standard library is now assumed.
(Plus special exceptions for MSVC.) In particular, emulation code for
64-bit integer arithmetic was removed, the C compiler must support a
64-bit integer type.
Standard library:
* Add new modules Bytes and BytesLabels for mutable byte sequences.
- add List.sort_uniq and Set.of_list
- a faster version of "raise" which does not maintain the backtrace
- support "Unix.kill pid Sys.sigkill" under Windows
- speed improvement for Buffer
- efficient creation of uninitialized float arrays
- Improve documentation regarding finalisers and multithreading
- Trigger warning 3 for all values marked as deprecated in the documentation.
