Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
I suspect it's unlikely that upstream will do (a), ever. There's a technical issue. OCaml really doesn't have a concept of an ABI. It does a kind of whole-program optimisation where even changes to the internal implementation of a library can affect the resulting binary. Moreover even if you "fixed" that, any change whatsoever to the library's signature or the version of compiler it was built with (even bugfix releases which have the same version number) will make the library incompatible.
You might also find this entertaining:
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2004/05/775714fbf05c17e0cbf5c...
I always like to be proven wrong ... An experimental dynamic linking of native code patch has just been added to OCaml CVS upstream.
Rich.