Dear Florian,

This is exciting and I definitely will test all my projects with the alpha!

 >Notably, the native compiler will only be available on the ARM64 and
x86-64 architectures in this 5.0 release.

Is there a plan to re-introduce support for other architectures in later 
releases,
or will they dropped completely from the official scope?

On 6/15/22 11:22, Florian Angeletti wrote:
> Dear OCaml users,
>
> Five months after the initial merge of the multicore branch into the 
> mainline
> OCaml and three months after the release of OCaml 4.14.0, OCaml 5.0.0 is
> starting to take shape.
>
> I am thus happy to announce an exceptional zeroth alpha release of
> OCaml 5.0.0 (see below for the installation instructions).
>
> This alpha release is expected to be rougher than an usual alpha release,
> due to the full rewrite of the OCaml runtime. In particular, the bytecode
> debugger will only be available in the next alpha release. Similarly, 
> there
> will be some changes to the internal C runtime API and to the files 
> installed
> by the compiler package in the next alpha release.
>
> Moreover, this zeroth alpha release is the occasion to remind everyone 
> that
> OCaml 5.0 itself is expected to be a more experimental release than usual.
> Notably, the native compiler will only be available on the ARM64 and
> x86-64 architectures in this 5.0 release.
>
> Nevertheless, this zeroth alpha version is already stable enough for 
> fellow
> hackers eager to join us in our early bug hunting and opam ecosystem 
> fixing fun,
> or to venture in the new era of parallelism and (experimental) effects.
>
> You can follow the progresses in stabilising the opam ecosystem on
>
> https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/issues/21526
>
> A brief summary is that at least dune, merlin, ppxlib, utop, ocamlfind,
> and ocamlbuild work (potentially by using patches from the
> alpha opam repository).
>
> If you find any bugs, please report them here:
>
> https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues
>
> In particular, any sequential OCaml 4 library or program should be 
> valid in
> OCaml 5 (except for deprecated modules and functions). Please don't 
> hesitate
> to report any forward-compatibility bugs!
>
> If you are interested by the ongoing list of bug fixes, the
> updated change log for OCaml 5.0.0 is available at:
>
> https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/5.0/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
> on opam 2.1:
>
> opam update
> opam switch create 5.0.0~alpha0
>
> For previous version of opam, the switch creation command line is 
> slightly more verbose:
>
> opam update
> opam switch create 5.0.0~alpha0 
> --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git
>
> 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> ocaml-variants.5.0.0~alpha0+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 5.0.0~alpha0+flambda+nffa 
> ocaml-variants.5.0.0~alpha0+options ocaml-option-flambda 
> ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array
>
> The command line above is slightly more complicated for an opam 
> version anterior to opam 2.1:
>
> opam update
> opam switch create <switch_name> 
> --packages=ocaml-variants.5.0.0~alpha0+options,<option_list> 
> --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git
>
> In both cases, all available options can be listed with
> "opam search ocaml-option".
>
> If you want to test this version, it is strongly 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/5.0.0-alpha0.tar.gz
> https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-5.0/ocaml-5.0.0~alpha0.tar.gz
>