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Alice is a radical OCaml build system developed by Stephen Sherratt that streamlines the compilation and dependency management workflow for OCaml projects. Currently at version 0.5.0 and having evolved through five distinct iterations, the tool addresses the traditionally fragmented landscape of OCaml build automation by offering a declarative, fast, and reproducible approach to constructing complex native executables, libraries, and documentation bundles. Typical use cases range from single-package academic prototypes to multi-component commercial systems that must target Unix, macOS, and Windows with consistent flags and sandboxed external dependencies; developers invoke a concise set of commands to generate lock files, download and cache third-party code, execute parallel builds, and run inline test suites without leaving the terminal. Because Alice encodes build rules in a statically typed DSL that leverages OCaml itself, teams benefit from compile-time validation of their pipeline logic while still gaining incremental rebuilds that only recompile affected modules, a feature especially valued in continuous-integration environments where cycle time directly impacts delivery velocity. The program belongs to the developer-tools/build-automation category and interoperates with existing opam repositories, allowing gradual migration from legacy Make or shell-based workflows. Alice 0.5.0 refines package resolution heuristics, shortens cold-build latency on Windows, and exposes a library interface for programmatic orchestration, making it practical for IDE plugins and CI generators that need deterministic invocation. The software is available for free on get.nero.com, with downloads provided via trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always delivering the latest version, and supporting batch installation of multiple applications.
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