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OCaml 4.14.2

This page describes OCaml version 4.14.2, released on Mar 14, 2024. Go here for a list of all releases.

This is a bug-fix release of OCaml 4.14.1.

As the last version of OCaml 4, the 4.14 branch of OCaml will be maintained during the transition period for OCaml 5. During this period, OCaml 4.14 will receive episodic bugfix updates as a long term support branch until at least 2024.

Installation Instructions

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

opam update
opam switch create 4.14.2

Configuration Options

The configuration of the installed opam switch can be tuned with the following options:

  • ocaml-option-afl: sets OCaml to be compiled with afl-fuzz instrumentation
  • ocaml-option-bytecode-only: compiles OCaml without the native-code compiler
  • ocaml-option-flambda: sets OCaml to be compiled with flambda activated
  • ocaml-option-musl: sets OCaml to be compiled with musl-gcc
  • ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array: sets OCaml to be compiled with --disable-flat-float-array
  • ocaml-option-static: sets OCaml to be compiled with musl-gcc -static
  • ocaml-option-32bit: sets OCaml to be compiled in 32-bit mode for 64-bit Linux and OS X hosts
  • ocaml-option-nnp: sets OCaml to be compiled with --disable-naked-pointers
  • ocaml-option-nnpchecker: set OCaml to be compiled with --enable-naked-pointers-checker
  • ocaml-option-fp: sets OCaml to be compiled with frame-pointers enabled

For instance, one can install a switch with both flambda and the naked-pointer checker enabled with:

opam switch create 4.14.2+flambda+nnpchecker ocaml-variants.4.14.2+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-nnpchecker

Source Distribution

  • Source tarball (.tar.gz) for compilation under Unix (including Linux and macOS X) and Microsoft Windows (including Cygwin).
  • Also available in .zip format.
  • opam is a source-based distribution of OCaml and many companion libraries and tools. Compilation and installation are automated by powerful package managers.
  • The official development repo is hosted on GitHub.

The INSTALL file of the distribution provides detailed compilation and installation instructions. See also the Windows release notes for instructions on how to build under Windows.

Changes in OCaml 4.14.2 (14 March 2024)

This is the changelog.

Runtime system:

  • #11764, #12577: Add prototypes to old-style C function definitions and declarations. (Antonin Décimo, review by Xavier Leroy and Nick Barnes)

  • #11763, #11759, #11861, #12509, #12577: Use strict prototypes on primitives. (Antonin Décimo, review by Xavier Leroy, David Allsopp, Sébastien Hinderer and Nick Barnes)

  • (breaking change) #10723: do not use -flat-namespace linking for macOS. (Carlo Cabrera, review by Damien Doligez)
  • #11332, #12702: make sure Bool_val(v) has type bool in C++ (Xavier Leroy, report by ygrek, review by Gabriel Scherer)

Build system:

  • #11590: Allow installing to a destination path containing spaces. (Élie Brami, review by Sébastien Hinderer and David Allsopp)

  • #12372: Pass option -no-execute-only to the linker for OpenBSD >= 7.3 so that code sections remain readable, as needed for closure marshaling. (Xavier Leroy and Anil Madhavapeddy, review by Anil Madhavapeddy and Sébastien Hinderer)

  • #12903: Disable control flow integrity on OpenBSD >= 7.4 to avoid illegal instruction errors on certain CPUs. (Michael Hendricks, review by Miod Vallat)

Bug fixes:

  • #12061, #12063: don't add inconsistent equalities when computing high-level error messages for functor applications and inclusions. (Florian Angeletti, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #12878: fix incorrect treatment of injectivity for private recursive types. (Jeremy Yallop, review by Gabriel Scherer and Jacques Garrigue)

  • #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)

  • #12264, #12289: Fix compact_allocate to avoid a pathological case that causes very slow compaction. (Damien Doligez, report by Arseniy Alekseyev, review by Sadiq Jaffer)

  • #12513, #12518: Automatically enable emulated fma for Visual Studio 2019+ to allow configuration with either pre-Haswell/pre-Piledriver CPUs or running in VirtualBox. Restores parity with the other Windows ports, which don't require explicit --enable-imprecise-c99-float-ops. (David Allsopp, report by Jonah Beckford and Kate Deplaix, review by Sébastien Hinderer)

  • #11633, #11636: bugfix in caml_unregister_frametable (Frédéric Recoules, review by Gabriel Scherer)

  • #12636, #12646: More prudent reinitialization of I/O mutexes after a fork() (Xavier Leroy, report by Zach Baylin, review by Enguerrand Decorne)

  • (breaking change) #10845 Emit frametable size on amd64 BSD (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD) systems (emitted for Linux in #8805) (Hannes Mehnert, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)

  • #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)

  • #12116, #12993: explicitly build non PIE executables on x86 32bits architectures (Florian Angeletti, review by David Allsopp)

  • #13018: Don't pass duplicate libraries to the linker when compiling ocamlc.opt and when using systhreads (new versions of lld emit a warning). (David Allsopp, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)