Alice the Caml

Alice is a radical, experimental OCaml build system and package manager for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Its goal is to allow anyone to program in OCaml with as little friction as possible.

Here’s how to run your first OCaml program on a computer with no pre-installed OCaml tools (you will need a C compiler though!):

$ alice tools get
$ alice new hello
$ cd hello
$ alice run

Hello, World!

That first line downloads an OCaml compiler toolchain and a couple of development tools (ocamllsp and ocamlformat). Skip it if you already have an existing installation of OCaml. Alice runs the OCaml compiler (ocamlopt.opt) and a few other programs from the compiler toolchain by searching the directories in your PATH variable and only uses its own installation of the tools (installed by alice tools get) as a fallback.

This project is exploring alternative approaches to OCaml packaging than those chosen by Opam and alternative approaches to building projects than those chosen by Dune. Compatibility with Opam packages is not a priority of Alice though I consider limited Opam compatibility to be a nice-to-have feature if it can be achieved without complicating Alice’s mental model.