ocaml-num is deprecated - switch to Zarith is recommended

[XVilka]

Previously Num was a part of OCaml compiler. Recently it was extracted out of it, and deprecated in favor of Zarith:

This is a legacy library. It used to be part of the core OCaml distribution (in otherlibs/num) but is now distributed separately. New applications that need arbitrary-precision arithmetic should use the Zarith library (https://github.com/ocaml/Zarith) instead of the Num library, and older applications that already use Num are encouraged to switch to Zarith. Zarith delivers much better performance than Num and has a nicer API.

from the https://github.com/ocaml/num/

[rixed]

Zarith has some external dependencies, whereas Num has none, if I'm correct.

[UnixJunkie]

Yes, zarith depends on gmp.
But is it really a problem?
One thing I am worried is if zarith doesn't support as many ocaml versions as num does.

Can opam support "we depend on A or B, A is preferred over B if both are possible"?

[UnixJunkie]

Is zarith higher performance than num?

[UnixJunkie]

the question has to be asked again with ocaml-5