Dear OCaml users, 

The set of new features for the future version 4.14.0 of OCaml has been stabilized, 
three months after the release of OCaml 4.13.1. I am thus happy to announce the 
first alpha release for OCaml 4.14.0 . 

This alpha version is here to help fellow hackers join us early in our bug 
hunting and opam ecosystem fixing fun (see below for the installation instructions). 
You can see the progress on this front at https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/issues/20501 . 

If you find any bugs, please report them here: 

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

Most major OCaml developer tools are already supported with this alpha 
(from odoc to merlin), thus I expect us to switch to beta releases in the 
beginning of February. The full release is expected to happen in late February. 
This early release will give us time to focus on the release of OCaml 5.0. 

If you are interested by the ongoing list of new features and bug fixes, the 
updated change log for OCaml 4.14.0 is available at: 

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/4.14/Changes 

Happy hacking, 
Florian Angeletti for the OCaml team. 

Installation instructions 
------------------------- 
The base compiler can be installed as an opam switch with the following commands 

opam update 
opam switch create 4.14.0~alpha1 --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git 

With opam 2.1, the previous command line can be simplified to 

opam update 
opam switch create 4.14.0~alpha1 

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

opam update 
opam switch create <switch_name> --packages=ocaml-variants.4.14.0~alpha1+options,<option_list> --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git 

or with opam 2.1: 

opam update 
opam switch create <switch_name> ocaml-variants.4.14.0~alpha1+options <option_list> 


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

opam switch create 4.14.0~alpha1+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.4.14.0~alpha1+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array 

All available options can be listed with "opam search ocaml-option". 

If you want to test this version, it is advised to install the alpha opam repository 

https://github.com/kit-ty-kate/opam-alpha-repository 

with 

opam repo add alpha git://github.com/kit-ty-kate/opam-alpha-repository.git 

This alpha repository contains various fixes in the process of being upstreamed. 

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

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/4.14.0-alpha1.tar.gz 
https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-4.14/ocaml-4.14.0~alpha1.tar.gz