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The spring-cleaning continues! When I originally prototyped Relocatable OCaml, it was during the OCaml 4.13 development cycle. The focus for the work originally was always about multiple versions of the compiler co-existing without interfering with each other, so even the early prototypes were done on both OCaml 4.12 and OCaml 4.13. In fact, I see that in this talk, I even demo’d it on both versions. My intention from the start had always been to be able to provide either backports or re-releases of older compilers, on the basis that it would be tedious to have only the latest releases of OCaml supporting the various fixes, given that the failing CI systems which had motivated the project would continue to test older versions for several/many years after completion. In 2021, OCaml 4.08 (from June 2019) was still a recent memory. From a technical perspective, OCaml 4.08 was a very important release. It’s the first version of OCaml with a reliably namespaced Standard Library (the Stdlib module, though introduced in 4.07, had various issues with shadowing modules which weren’t completely addressed until 4.08). For my work, it was the version where we switched the configuration system to autoconf, and thus introduced a configuration system for the Windows ports. It provided a natural baseline in 2022 for the backports, and thus the workshop demonstration I gave in Ljubljana featured Windows and Linux for OCaml 4.08-4.14 as well as preview of OCaml 5.0.

Most of the time, you don’t think about how your file is linked. We’ve come to love dynamically linked files with their small file sizes and reduced memory requirements, but there are times when the convenience of a single binary download from a GitHub release page is really what you need.

The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries - Issues · ocaml/ocaml