Programming environment

How do I debug Objective Caml code?

Compile them with the bytecode compiler and use the ocamldebug replay debugger. The debugger was ported from Caml Light recently and still contains a few rough edges, but is already very helpful.

Other options include inserting print statements in your code (often the best way to deal with really large programs), or load it under the toplevel system and use the trace facility.

Source-level debugging of native code is technically very challenging and will probably never be supported. Instead, we aim at 100% compatibility between the bytecode and native-code compilers, so that programs can be debugged on the bytecode system, then compiled to efficient native code.

How do I profile Objective Caml code?

The profiler from Caml Light has been ported recently. This tool provides execution counts for functions, branches of pattern-matchings, etc, but no time information.

With the native-code compiler, you can try to use the standard Unix profiler gprof on the executable file. Just add the -p option at link-time. (As of release 2.00, this is fully supported only on Linux/Intel and Alpha/Digital Unix machines.)

What happened to all the contributed Caml Light libraries and tools?

Most of them have been eventually ported to O'Caml, in particular the unix, camltk, str and num libraries.


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Author: Xavier Leroy -- Last modified: 1998/10/16