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, France's national research institute for computer science, 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.