The goal of this project is to explore a radically different approach to OCaml build systems and package management, breaking from the Opam/Dune-based ecosystem completely. No attempt will be made to keep compatibility with Opam packages, though it should be possible to manually port simple packages. The UX is inspired mostly by Cargo.

Concrete differences from Opam/Dune:

• No S-expressions or custom metadata formats. TOML only. This avoids the need to write custom parser logic, and for editors to understand new syntaxes and auto-formatting rules.
• The OCaml compiler and dev tools are not packages, and will be provided as binary downloads, managed by this tool.
• Packages that build with alice do not depend on alice. This allows alice to depend on packages from its own ecosystem (once it's bootstrapped).
• Users cannot define build rules. alice will know how to compile OCaml and C executables and libraries. This lets us keep the config file format simple.
• Discourage open upper/lower bounds on dependency versions. Packages (including ports of Opam packages) will be versioned with semver.
• Packages will be namespaced with github (and possibly other forge) usernames. Anyone can release a package instantly by pushing a tag.
• Strong opinion about how code is organized. By default code lives in a src directory, with entry points named main.ml or lib.ml for executables or libraries respectively. These defaults can be overridden, mostly to simplify porting. This will make it easy to initialize new projects and to navigate the source code of unfamiliar projects.
• The build/install commands of a package cannot be configured.
• Packages have the same dependencies regardless of environment.

I'm one of the core Dune developers for my day job. Dune is a mature and widely used OCaml build system which makes it difficult to make large structural changes to its UI and packaging philosophy. Alice is an experiment exploring the design space of OCaml build systems when these constraints are lifted.

Its name comes from an Australian children's song.

It's recommended to use direnv with the following .envrc while working on this:

export PATH=$HOME/.alice/current/bin:$PATH
export DUNE_CONFIG__PORTABLE_LOCK_DIR=enabled
export DUNE_CONFIG__PKG_BUILD_PROGRESS=enabled

Run the script in boot for your system to bootstrap an environment with the tools needed to build alice.

On NixOS, use the musl-static builds of the binaries, and add use nix to .envrc to install the musl libraries via shell.nix.