[Caml-list] [ANN] RISC-V native backend, no longer cross-compiling

[Nicolas Ojeda Bar <n.oje.bar@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

A little over a year ago, I announced [1] a preliminary release of a
native-code backend for the OCaml compiler targeting the emerging
RISC-V architecture [2].  Due to the state of the RISC-V development
tools at the time, this backend existed only in the form of a
native-code cross-compiler and had many limitations.

Since then, the RISC-V community has made considerable progress to the
point that it is now easy to run a full Linux environment (including
gcc + friends) natively on RISC-V [3, 4].

Today I am happy to announce a preliminary, native release of the full
OCaml system on RISC-V. It is available at

    https://www.github.com/nojb/riscv-ocaml.

It targets the 64-bit variant of the RISC-V architecture, RV64G (the
32-bit variant should also work, but has not been tested).  All
libraries are supported (Dynlink and Num have a couple of issues left,
but I expect them to be resolved shortly).

I plan to maintain and keep developing this port for the foreseeable
future, tracking official OCaml releases.  It is currently based on
the recently released 4.04.0.

If you would like to play around with it, a Docker image is available
with an installed 4.04 ready to go:

    docker run -it nojb/riscv-ocaml:4.04.0 /bin/bash

As usual, any and all comments are warmly welcome.

Thanks!

Best wishes,
Nicolas

[1] https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2015-06/msg00046.html
[2] https://riscv.org/
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V
[4] https://hub.docker.com/r/sorear/fedora-riscv-wip/