OCaml 5.0.0 is out!
We have the pleasure of celebrating the birthdays of Jane Austen and Arthur C. Clarke by announcing the release of OCaml version 5.0.0.
The highlight of this new major version of OCaml is the long-awaited runtime support for shared memory parallelism and effect handlers.
This multicore support is the culmination of more than 8 years of effort, and required a full rewrite of the OCaml runtime environment. Consequently, OCaml 5.0.0 is expected to be a more experimental version of OCaml than the usual OCaml releases.
In this release, the native compiler only supports the x86-64 and arm64 architectures. In terms of operating systems, Linux, the BSDs, macOS and mingw64 on Windows are supported.
We are planning to restore the support for most previously supported architectures and operating systems, and address remaining known issues over the course of the next year.
Don’t let those words of caution hinder your experimentation with OCaml 5: OCaml 5 as a language is fully compatible with OCaml 4 down to the performance characteristics of your programs. In other words, any code that works with OCaml 4 should work the same with OCaml 5.