Ocaml 5.1 Released — 50% Smaller Installation Size

The new release of OCaml brings a lot of improvements in all departments marking the next step in the OCaml journey

After the fabolous release of Ocaml 5.0 I’ve wrote in January 2023, now in September we can enjoy the Ocaml 5.1 release that comes with some awesome improvements.

The team was able to reduce the filesystem size of installed artifacts of the compiler distribution by 50% from over 500 to around 200MiB. It was done by using compressed files and removing useless debugging information and also not installing native executables when not needed.

Other improvements in this release include:

• Many runtime performance regression and memory-leak fixes (dynlinking, weak array, weak hash sets, GC with idle domains, GC prefetching).
• Restored support for native code generation on RISC-V and s390x architectures.
• Restored Cygwin port.
• Reduced installation size (50% reduction)
• Compressed compilation artefacts (.cmi, .cmt, .cmti, .cmo, .cma files)
• 19 error message improvements
• 14 standard library functions made tail-recursive with Tail-Recursion-Modulo-Cons (TRMC), such as List.append and List.map.
• 57 new standard library functions
• More examples in the standard library documentation
• 42 bug fixes

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