Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] ocaml 3.08 version?

[Nicolas C. <war...@fr...>]

> > The CVS version is up-to-date.
> > I will make an official release when I have some spare time (if someone
> > want to be release manager on SourceForge, please drop me an email).
> >
> > Nicolas Cannasse
>
> Yes, the CVS version works great. Could you explain to me how you fixed
> it? I see that you prepended a percent sign to all of the externals. Is
this
> an ocaml compiler feature? Or is it being preprocessed by sed or
something?

There is two kind of externals, "real" externals : they have a primitive
name.
This kind of primitive :
    external imake : int -> int -> 'a intern = "obj_is_block"
need now to be prefixed with "caml_" in order to compiler under 3.08  :
    external imake : int -> int -> 'a intern = "caml_obj_is_block"
but was also used by the Obj module, so I wrote :
    let imake tag len = (Obj.magic (Obj.new_block tag len) : 'a intern)
so it use current Obj module primitive , with an additional access per-call
tradeoff.

Other externals, the ones prexifed with "%" are built-in directly into the
compiler, so does not actually wrap a C primitive, they are then

> I'm guessing that this allows extlib to compile under 3.07 and 3.08. I've
> seen a few other projects wrestling with this issue, so if you could
explain
> what you did then I can help them make their projects compile on 3.07 and
> 3.08 too.
>
> Thanks!

They need to use the same trick and check where in OCaml stdlib the
primitive they need is defined.

Nicolas Cannasse