OxCaml

A performance-focused version of OCaml. This is also the home of the Flambda 2 optimiser and the Cfg backend.

OxCaml is currently based on OCaml 5.4 (plus some patches from later upstream revisions, mainly in the runtime).

The following gives basic instructions for getting set up. Please see HACKING.md for more detailed instructions if you want to develop in this repo. That file also contains instructions for installing the OxCaml compiler in a way that it can be used to build OPAM packages.

One-time setup for dev work or installation

The supported platforms are x86-64 and arm64 Linux; and arm64 macOS. x86 macOS may still work.

One-time setup:

$ opam switch create oxcaml-dev --empty
$ opam pin add -ny git+https://github.com/oxcaml/oxcaml
$ opam switch set-invariant -y --packages oxcaml-dev
$ eval $(opam env)

You can check that an existing opam switch is using the currently required versions of tools by running:

$ opam upgrade oxcaml-dev

You probably then want to fork the oxcaml/oxcaml repo to your own Github org.

Branching and configuring

Use normal commands to make a branch from the desired upstream branch (typically main), e.g.:

$ git clone https://github.com/oxcaml/oxcaml
$ cd oxcaml
$ git checkout -b myfeature origin/main

The OxCaml tree has to be configured before building. The configure script is not checked in; you have to run autoconf. For example:

$ autoconf
$ ./configure --prefix=/path/to/install/dir

Building and installing

To build and install OxCaml, which produces a compiler installation directory whose layout is compatible with upstream, run:

$ make install