[Caml-list] Status and schedule of the 4.03.0 release

[Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr>]

Dear OCaml users,

Here is a summary of what's going on with the next release of OCaml:

We had a developer meeting on Nov 18 to decide which features will
go into the next release. As far as large features are concerned,
the set is now fixed. In addition to what's already in the Changes
file, we'll have:

- named constructor arguments (aka inline records)
- compiler annotations for performance (@tailcall @inline @unbox @noalloc...)
- flambda: major changes in the compiler pipeline
- GC improvements: no more large GC pause times
- Ephemerons: a generalization of weak pointers
- Ocamlbuild: spin off as an independent project

Note that, while they are still in Changes at the moment, we
have decided to remove the user-defined indexing operators
( .() .()<- etc. ) for the moment, because they clash with
another planned feature. They will probably be back in some
form in 4.04.

Our planned schedule is as follows:
- December: merging features
- December 20: end of merge window, creation of 4.03 branch,
  beta version.
- January: debugging
- early February: release

We are also planning to release an alpha version of the multicore
system as an OPAM switch shortly after the 4.03.0 release.

We are working hard on this release, and we need the cooperation of
all OCaml programmers, especially library authors: test your code on
trunk, adapt to the (few) incompatible changes, report bugs as early
as you can.

Happy hacking,

-- Damien