Caml is a general-purpose programming language, designed with
program safety and reliability in mind. It is very expressive, yet
easy to learn and use.
Caml supports functional, imperative, and object-oriented
programming styles. It has been
developed and distributed by INRIA, a French
research institute in computer science and applied
mathematics, since 1985.
The OCaml system is the main
implementation of the Caml language. It features a powerful
module system and a
full-fledged object-oriented layer. It comes with a native-code
compiler that supports numerous architectures, for high
performance; a bytecode compiler,
for increased portability; and an interactive loop, for
experimentation and rapid development.
The Caml Light system is an older,
lightweight implementation of the core Caml language.
It is obsolete, no longer actively maintained, and will be
removed eventually.
We recommend switching immediately to its successor, OCaml.
In addition to the official distribution of the Caml
compilers, this site provides a collection of online
resources that are useful to Caml users, from beginners to
expert programmers. Most of them were contributed by the
very active community of Caml programmers.