Alice the Caml
Alice is an experimental OCaml build system emphasizing accessibility. It’s still very much a work in progress and nowhere near ready for regular use. Currently it can build multi-file OCaml projects to executables and libraries. Its UI is inspired by cargo. Here’s a tiny demo:
$ alice new hello
$ cd hello
$ cat src/main.ml
let () = print_endline "Hello, World!"
$ alice run
Hello, World!
It has incremental builds though they are currently sequential. It generates a
build graph which could be executed in parallel but this is future work. Running
alice dot prints a graphviz file representing the build graph.
It uses my climate library for its CLI and so contains an inbuilt mechanism for generating bash completion scripts.
It doesn’t assume anything about your OCaml compiler setup. You can install the compiler with opam or nix or your system package manager or manually build it from source if you like. However it does come with a mechanism for downloading a precompiled OCaml toolchain and some other tools (an LSP server and code formatter), avoiding the need for users to build the compiler from source which can be time-consuming. Precompiled toolchains are available for Linux x86_64, MacOS x86_64/aarch64 and Windows x86_64, though I haven’t yet ported Alice to Windows. Alice deviates from opam in that the compiler and development tools are not considered to be packages.
There’s currently no packaging story and packages cannot yet depend on one another. It would be nice to one day support depending on opam packages but this is not going to be the default package format and opam compatibility isn’t a major priority for the project. Instead I’ll design a packaging system prioritizing easy of publishing and maintenance with as low cognitive load as possible, and then see how opam compatibility can fit into that picture.
The name comes from an Australian kids song.
My next two goals for the project are Windows support and basic package management.
$ alice --help
Alice is a build system for OCaml projects.
Usage: alice [COMMAND]
alice [OPTION]…
Options:
-h, --help Show this help message.
Commands:
build, b Build a project.
clean, c Delete all generated build artifacts.
dot Print graphviz source describing build artifact dependencies.
new Create a new alice project.
tools Manage tools for building and developing OCaml projects.
run, r Build a project and run its executable.
help Print documentation for a subcommand.
internal Internal commands.