The 1.0.0 release of dune is planned for next week. It will be the first release of jbuilder as dune, so what to expect for existing jbuilder projects?

The good news is that dune is fully backward compatible with jbuilder. The dune package in opam will install both dune and jbuilder binaries and both will be usable on existing jbuilder projects.

We do want to stop supporting jbuilder projects eventually, so the plan is to continue to support the jbuilder binary and jbuild files for another year. 6 months from now dune will start displaying warnings when using the jbuilder binary or jbuild files. A more detailied migration plan is available in the manual. In particular it contains a precise list of things to do to migrate a jbuilder project to a dune project.

We hope that the new features in Dune 1.0.0 and subsequent releases will be enough of an incentive for users to eagerly switch to Dune

Important changes in Dune

This section is not an exhaustive list of changes, but it describes the important changes to expect when switching from jbuilder to dune .

Versioning and configuration files

A big part of the work in Dune 1.0.0 was getting the versioning story right. With jbuilder it was hard for us to make the language evolve without breaking the build of existing projects. Dune can handle that gracefully and in the future it will be much easier to introduce breaking changes.

The versioning of all dune files in a project is controlled via a single dune-project file at the root of the project. This file contains the version of the dune language and extensions used in the project.

While this file is required in order to ensure compatibility with future versions of Dune, it is not required to write one by hand every time you start a new project or want to do a quick experiment. Dune will create and edit this file for you as needed, so simply start by creating a dune file (the new jbuild files) and dune will take care of the rest.

Note that the syntax inside dune , dune-project , … files is slightly different from the one inside jbuild files. In particular the language requires fewer parentheses and the syntax of variables changed from ${...} to %{...} to avoid issues with shell commands. This is detailed in the migration plan as well.

Build profiles and default settings

Up to now jbuilder supported a --dev option in order to enable stricter flags. There have been several changes regarding this. First of all you are now able to define as many build profiles as you want: dev , release , perf , … These can be selected either via the --profile command line option or via the dune-workspace file. You are also able to define what the default compilation flags mean for each profile via an env stanza.

Another important change is that the default build profile for the dune binary is dev rather than release . We found that most of the time developpers want the development mode by default. Please remember to add "-p" name to all invocations of dune in opam files! This is now even more important than before in order to ensure the release profile is selected for opam builds.

Default target

Dune allows to configure what happens when you run dune build without any specific targets. This is done via the introduction of a default alias.

More parellelism by default

If you had (jobs N) in you ~/.config/dune/config file, you can remove it. Dune now automatically sets the number of jobs that can be run in parallel to the number of processing units available. The previous default was 4. For opam files, you should remember to add "-j" jobs in order to let opam decide.

Future of Dune

Now that we have a good versioning story and with the new testing tools that are emerging, I’m hoping that at some point we will be able to declare that the master of Dune is stable. At this point opam releases will just become a monthly or even weekly formality. This should make the experience nicer for both developers and users of Dune.