On behalf of the dune team, I’m pleased to announce the release of dune 1.7.0. This release is the biggest release since 1.0 and I’m excited to present it to you. The change log is quite long so I’ll summarize the most noteworthy changes:

Dune now has a --trace-file to profile slow builds using shiny flame graphs in Chrome.

There’s now a mode to disable transitive dependencies. This mode still has some caveats because it lacks proper compiler support. But we welcome user reports regarding its usability.

The virtual libraries feature has made it to 1.7.0. I’ve blogged about it before

The jbuilder binary and jbuild files are officially deprecated. But not to worry, we’ve created a $ dune upgrade command to do the hard work for you.

As usual, the (exceedingly long) change list is available for your convenience:

Second step of the deprecation of jbuilder: the jbuilder binary

now emits a warning on every startup and both jbuilder and dune

emit warnings when encountering jbuild files (#1752, @jeremiedimino)

Change the layout of build artifacts inside _build. The new layout enables

optimizations that depend on the presence of .cmx files of private modules

(#1676, @bobot)

Fix merlin handling of private module visibility (#1653 @bobot)

unstable-fmt: use boxes to wrap some lists (#1608, fix #1153, @emillon,

thanks to @rgrinberg)

skip directories when looking up programs in the PATH (#1628, fixes

#1616, @jeremiedimino)

Use lsof on macOS to implement --stats (#1636, fixes #1634, @xclerc)

Generate dune-package files for every package. These files are installed and

read instead of META files whenever they are available (#1329, @rgrinberg)

Fix preprocessing for libraries with (include_subdirs ..) (#1624, fix #1626,

@nojb, @rgrinberg)

Do not generate targets for archive that don’t match the modes field.

(#1632, fix #1617, @rgrinberg)

When executing actions, open files lazily and close them as soon as

possible in order to reduce the maximum number of file descriptors

opened by Dune (#1635, #1643, fixes #1633, @jonludlam, @rgrinberg,

@jeremiedimino)

Reimplement the core of Dune using a new generic memoization system

(#1489, @rudihorn, @jeremiedimino)

Replace the broken cycle detection algorithm by a state of the art

one from this paper (#1489,

@rudihorn)

Get the correct environment node for multi project workspaces (#1648,

@rgrinberg)

Add dune compute to call internal memoized functions (#1528,

@rudihorn, @jeremiedimino)

Add --trace-file option to trace dune internals (#1639, fix #1180, @emillon)

Add --no-print-directory (borrowed from GNU make) to suppress

Entering directory messages. (#1668, @dra27)

Remove --stats and track fd usage in --trace-file (#1667, @emillon)

Add virtual libraries feature and enable it by default (#1430 fixes #921,

@rgrinberg)

Fix handling of Control+C in watch mode (#1678, fixes #1671, @jeremiedimino)

Look for jsoo runtime in the same dir as the js_of_ocaml binary

when the ocamlfind package is not available (#1467, @nojb)

Make the seq package available for OCaml >= 4.07 (#1714, @rgrinberg)

Add locations to error messages where a rule fails to generate targets and

rules that require files outside the build/source directory. (#1708, fixes

#848, @rgrinberg)

Let Configurator handle sizeof (in addition to negative numbers).

(#1726, fixes #1723, @Chris00)

Fix an issue causing menhir generated parsers to fail to build in

some cases. The fix is to systematically use -short-paths when

calling ocamlc -i (#1743, fix #1504, @jeremiedimino)

Never raise when printing located errors. The code that would print the

location excerpts was prone to raising. (#1744, fix #1736, @rgrinberg)

Add a dune upgrade command for upgrading jbuilder projects to Dune

(#1749, @jeremiedimino)

When automatically creating a dune-project file, insert the

detected name in it (#1749, @jeremiedimino)

Add (implicit_transitive_deps <bool>) mode to dune projects. When this mode

is turned off, transitive dependencies are not accessible. Only listed

dependencies are directly accessible. (#1734, #430, @rgrinberg, @hnrgrgr)

Add toplevel stanza. This stanza is used to define toplevels with libraries

already preloaded. (#1713, @rgrinberg)

Generate .merlin files that account for normal preprocessors defined using a

subset of the action language. (#1768, @rgrinberg)

Emit (orig_src_dir <path>) metadata in dune-package for dune packages

built with --store-orig-source-dir command line flag (also controlled by

DUNE_STORE_ORIG_SOURCE_DIR env variable). This is later used to generate

.merlin with S -directives pointed to original source locations and thus

allowing merlin to see those. (#1750, @andreypopp)

Improve the behavior of dune promote when the files to be promoted have been

deleted. (#1775, fixes #1772, @jeremiedimino)

unstable-fmt: preserve comments (#1766, @emillon)

Pass flags correctly when using staged_pps (#1779, fixes #1774, @jeremiedimino)

Fix an issue with the use of (mode promote) in the menhir

stanza. It was previously causing intermediate mock files to be

promoted (#1783, fixes #1781, @jeremiedimino)

unstable-fmt: ignore files using OCaml syntax (#1784, @emillon)

Configurator: Add which function to replace the which command line utility

in a cross platform way. (#1773, fixes #1705, @Chris00)

Make configurator append paths to $PKG_CONFIG_PATH on macOS. Previously it

was prepending paths and thus $PKG_CONFIG_PATH set by users could have been

overridden by homebrew installed libraries (#1785, @andreypopp)

Disallow c/cxx sources that share an object file in the same stubs archive.

This means that foo.c and foo.cpp can no longer exist in the same library.

(#1788, @rgrinberg)

Forbid use of %{targets} (or ${@} in jbuild files) inside

preprocessing actions

(#1812, fixes #1811, @jeremiedimino)

Add DUNE_PROFILE environment variable to easily set the profile. (#1806,

@rgrinberg)

Deprecate the undocumented (no_keep_locs) field. It was only

necessary until virtual libraries were supported (#1822, fix #1816,

@jeremiedimino)

Rename unstable-fmt to format-dune-file and remove its --inplace option.

(#1821, @emillon).

Autoformatting: (using fmt 1.1) will also format dune files (#1821, @emillon).