Dear OCaml users,

Four months after the release of OCaml 5.0.0, the set of new features for t= he
future version 5.1.0 of OCaml has been frozen. I am thus happy to announce = the
first alpha release for OCaml 5.1.0 .

This alpha version is here to help fellow hackers join us early in our bug<= br> hunting and opam ecosystem fixing fun (see below for the installation instr= uctions).
You can see the progress on this front at https://github.com/ocaml/opam-rep= ository/issues/23669 .

If you find any bugs, please report them here:

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues

Note that this early alpha version is missing two important fixes for the g= arbage
collector and Windows support. Those fixes will be available before the bet= a.
The full release is expected to happen in July.

If you are interested by the ongoing list of new features and bug fixes, th= e
updated change log for OCaml 5.1.0 is available at:

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/5.1/Changes

Happy hacking,
Florian Angeletti for the OCaml team.

Installation instructions
-------------------------
The base compiler can be installed as an opam switch with the following com= mands
on opam 2.1:

opam update
opam switch create 5.1.0~alpha1

For previous version of opam, the switch creation command line is slightly = more verbose:

opam update
opam switch create 5.1.0~alpha1 --repositories=3Ddefault,beta=3Dgit+htt= ps://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git

If you want to tweak the configuration of the compiler, you can switch to t= he option variant with:

opam update
opam switch create <switch_name> ocaml-variants.5.1.0~alpha1+opti= ons <option_list>

where <option_list> is a comma separated list of ocaml-option-* packa= ges. For instance, for a flambda and no-flat-float-array switch:

opam switch create 5.1.0~alpha1+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.5.1.0~a= lpha1+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array

The command line above is slightly more complicated for opam version anteri= or to 2.1:

opam update
opam switch create <switch_name> --packages=3Docaml-variants.5.1.0~al= pha1+options,<option_list> --repositories=3Ddefault,beta=3Dgit= 3;https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git

In both cases, all available options can be listed with "opam search o= caml-option".

The source code for the alpha is also available at these addresses:

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/5.1.0-alpha1.tar.gz
https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-5.1/ocaml-5.1.0~alpha1.tar.gz=