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Feature Name OCaml 3.12

Summary

OCaml 3.12 is a major new release of the OCaml language and compiler.

The 8 new major language features are described in this paper (PDF - skip to section 3), and as well as these new features there are new supporting camlp4 and libraries.

Owner

NOTE

I (rjones) am on holiday all of February, and won't be available on email or IRC.

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 15
  • Last updated: 2011-02-03
  • Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description

OCaml 3.12 is a major revision of the OCaml programming language, the camlp4 macro language, libraries, and CDuce for XML processing.

New language features include:

  • modules are now first-class values
  • nested module open
  • open record notation
  • mark OO methods which must be overridden in subclasses
  • limited support for delimited overloading in the language

camlp4 and camlp5 macro languages have been revised and extended.

The changes are completely backwards compatible.

Benefit to Fedora

For Fedora this brings the OCaml support right up to date and alongside Debian. It also enables our developers to use a powerful and fast programming language.

Scope

What needs to be done is to update all of the packages listed on this page:

http://cocan.org/fedora#Package_status

Some of them will simply be a recompile, some of them have new upstream versions which are compatible with 3.12.

How To Test

No special hardware is needed.

Users can test the new features by compiling their own programs or playing in the REPL:

$ rlwrap ocaml

User Experience

End users won't notice the difference. Developers will have a more powerful and up to date OCaml to use.

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

Stay with OCaml 3.11.

Documentation

Release Notes

  • Fedora 15 includes OCaml 3.12, a major new release of the OCaml language and compiler.

Comments and Discussion