OCaml 4.07.1 (4 October 2018)
-----------------------------

This release consists mostly of bug fixes. The most salient bugs were

- MPR#7820, GPR#1897: a bug in Array.of_seq (new in 4.07)
  (Thierry Martinez, review by Nicolás Ojeda Bär)

- MPR#7815, GPR#1896: crash in the major GC with the first-fit policy
  (Stephen Dolan and Damien Doligez, report by Joris Giovannangeli)

- MPR#7821, GPR#1908: the compiler loads more cmi, which breaks some builds
  (Jérémie Dimino, review by Gabriel Scherer)

- MPR#7833, GPR#1946: typechecking failure (regression) on large GADT matchings
  (Thomas Refis, report by Jerome Simeon, review by Jacques Garrigue)

See the detailed list of fixes at (Changes#4.07.1).


OCaml 4.07.0 (10 July 2018):
----------------------------

Some highlights of this release are:

-   The way the standard library modules are organized internally has
    changed (GPR#1010, by Jérémie Dimino):

    1. the `List` module (for example) is now named `Stdlib__list`
    2. a new Stdlib module contains a series of aliases
    such as `module List = Stdlib__list`
    3. the `Stdlib` module is implicitly opened when type-checking OCaml
    programs (as `Pervasives` previously was), so that `Stdlib.List` can be
    accessed as just `List`, as before.

    This should be invisible to most users, although it is possible that
    some tools show the `Stdlib.` or `Stdlib__` prefixes in
    messages. (You might want to report these situations as usability
    bugs.) The change prevents standard library modules from conflicting
    with end-user filenames (please avoid `stdlib.ml` and the
    `Stdlib__` prefix); we may introduce new standard library modules in
    the future with less fear of breaking user code. In particular,
    `Float` (GPR#1638, by Nicolás Ojeda Bär) and `Seq` (GPR#1002, by
    Simon Cruanes) modules have now been added to the standard library.

-   The error messages caused by various typing errors have been improved
    to be easier to understand, in particular for beginners.
    (GPR#1505, GPR#1510, by Arthur Charguéreau and Armaël Guéneau)

    For example,

        # while 1 do () done;;
                ^
        Error: This expression has type int but
               an expression was expected of type bool

    now adds the extra explanation

        because it is in the condition of a while-loop

-   Effort has been made to reduce the compilation time of flambda
    programs, and the size of the produced `.cmx` files when using
    the -Oclassic optimisation level.
    (GPR#1401, GPR#1455, GPR#1627, GPR#1665, by Pierre Chambart, Xavier
    Clerc, Fuyong Quah, and Leo White)

-   The HTML manual has benefited from various style improvements
    and should look visually nicer than previous editions.
    (GPR#1741, GPR#1757, GPR#1767 by Charles Chamberlain and steinuil)

    The new version of the manual can be consulted at
    <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-4.07/>; see the
    previous version for comparison at
    <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-4.06/>.

-   Since 4.01, it is possible to select a variant constructor or
    record field from a sub-module that is not opened in the current
    scope, if type information is available at the point of use. This
    now also works for GADT constructors.
    (GPR#1648, by Thomas Refis and Leo White)

-   The GC should handle the accumulation of custom blocks in the minor
    heap better; this solves some memory-usage issues observed by code
    which allocates a lot of small custom blocks, typically small bigarrays
    (GPR#1476, by Alain Frsich)

See also the detailed list of changes: (Changes#4.07.0).


OCaml 4.06.1 (16 Feb 2018):
---------------------------

This release consists mostly of bug fixes. The most salient bugs were

-   An incorrect compilation of pattern-matching in presence of
    extensible variant constructors (such as exceptions), that had been
    present for a long time.
    (GPR#1459, GPR#1538, by Luc Maranget, Thomas Refis and Gabriel Scherer)

-   An optimization of `not (x = y)` into `x <> y`, introduced in
    4.06.0, is incorrect on floating-point numbers in the `nan`
    case. (GPR#1470, by Leo White)

See the detailed list of fixes at (Changes#4.06.1).


OCaml 4.06.0 (3 Nov 2017):
--------------------------

-   Strings (type `string`) are now immutable by default. In-place
    modification must use the type `bytes` of byte sequences, which is
    distinct from `string`.  This corresponds to the `-safe-string`
    compile-time option, which was introduced in OCaml 4.02 in 2014, and
    which is now the default.
    (GPR#1252, by Damien Doligez)

-   Object types can now extend a previously-defined object type,
    as in `<t; a: int>`.
    (GPR#1118, by Runhang Li)

-   Destructive substitution over module signatures can now express more
    substitutions, such as `S with type M.t := type-expr` and `S with
    module M.N := path`.
    (GPR#792, by Valentin Gatien-Baron)

-   Users can now define operators that look like array indexing,
    e.g. `let ( .%() ) = List.nth in [0; 1; 2].%(1)`
    (GPR#1064, GPR#1392, by Florian Angeletti)

-   New escape `\u{XXXX}` in string literals, denoting the UTF-8
    encoding of the Unicode code point `XXXX`.
    (GPR#1232, by Daniel Bünzli)

-   Full Unicode support was added to the Windows runtime system.  In
    particular, file names can now contain Unicode characters.
    (GPR#153, GPR#1200, GPR#1357, GPR#1362, GPR#1363, GPR#1369, GPR#1398,
    GPR#1446, GPR#1448, by ygrek and Nicolás Ojeda Bär)

-   An alternate register allocator based on linear scan can be selected
    with `ocamlopt -linscan`.  It reduces compilation time compared with
    the default register allocator.
    (GPR#375, Marcell Fischbach and Benedikt Meurer)

-   The Num library for arbitrary-precision integer and rational
    arithmetic is no longer part of the core distribution and can be
    found as a separate OPAM package.

See the detailed list of changes: (Changes#4.06.0).


OCaml 4.05.0 (13 Jul 2017):
---------------------------

Some highlights include:

-   Instrumentation support for fuzzing with afl-fuzz.
    (GPR#504, by Stephen Dolan)

-   The compilers now accept new `-args/-args0 <file>` command-line
    parameters to provide extra command-line arguments in a file.  User
    programs may implement similar options using the new `Expand`
    constructor of the `Arg` module.
    (GPR#748, GPR#843, GPR#864, by Bernhard Schommer)

-   Many functions of the standard library that raise an exception now
    have an option-returning variable suffixed by `_opt` Typical
    examples of the new functions include:

        int_of_string_opt: string -> int option
        List.nth_opt: 'a list -> int -> 'a option
        Hashtbl.find_opt : ('a, 'b) t -> 'a -> 'b option

    (GPR#885, by Alain Frisch)

-   The security of the runtime system is now hardened by using `secure_getenv`
    to access environment variables whenever its possible, to avoid unplanned
    privilege-escalation when running setuid binaries.
    (GPR#1213, by Damien Doligez)

See the detailed list of changes: (Changes#4.05.0).
