After consultation on the core developers' list I am proposing this patch to remove support for compiler plugins.
The main motivations for removing compiler plugins are:
- They are a potential security risk.
- They increase the complexity of the build system and make maintenance of the Dynlink libraries more difficult (although actually, this complexity could probably be reduced after #2268 is merged).
- Many applications of plugins should be able to be expressed by building custom compiler drivers that link against compilerlibs.
* Remove compiler plugins and hooks
* Add new function Dynlink.unsafe_get_global_symbol but keep it outside the documented API.
* Remove otherlibs/dynlink/nodynlink.ml
* Update Changes
This allows external tools to rely on the features provided by this module. An example
is ocamldoc itself, which could now be implemented as an external tool.
Note that LexiFi variants of OCaml has been embedding depend.ml in the compiler for a long
time in order to support a stricter dependency mode where the compiler is only allowed to load .cmi
files corresponding to dependencies as inferred by ocamldep (hereby ensuring that ocamldep is
sound by construction).
Mark Shinwell
Florian Angeletti
Gabriel Radanne
Fabrice Le Fessant
alainfrisch