I don't know enough of the compiler build machinery to understand if that is correct, but I warmly welcome the change. Indeed bootstrapping on primitive changes is a pain and makes some sorts of contributions much more delicate. (It also generates conflicts that makes handling out-of-tree branches painful, etc.)

Thanks for this very productive work.

@gerdstolpmann should look at this, as it's getting close to cross-compilation territory.

Anyway, let's wait for 4.04, there's a lot going on now and I don't want to risk breaking the makefiles at this time.

Basically, we have primitives that are hard-coded in the compiler (e.g. look at the beginnning of Translcore, it assumes caml_equal and others), and primitives that are used in the standard library. The -use-prims option is correct for the latter. My thinking is that there should also be a list of hard-coded primitives that is merged with the loaded list.

But anyway, given that there are rarely new hard-coded primitives the new approach is better than the old one. I don't see any problems with cross-compilation. On the contrary, host and target compilers could now even deviate with respect to the primitives.

Thanks! Merged (manually -- somehow Git got overly confused while trying to merge, apparently by Windows EOL in .nt files).