Reading « Are you still using OCaml 4.08 or earlier? », as a scientific practitioner I ask myself:
Well, 5 years is an eternity in the computing world – OCaml 4.08 is from 2019 and OCaml 4.07 from 2018, IIRC – but it’s peanuts when we speak about being able to audit and verify some scientific papers relying on these versions.
And there is the balance with the carbon footprint.
The question does not seem to retain 4.08 but to be able to rebuild from scratch 4.08, i.e., being able to rebuild all its dependencies. Thus it asks about the #bootstrap of the compiler and how we preserve it.