RE: [Caml-list] compiling C library wrapper

["David Allsopp" <dra-news@metastack.com>]

Aaron Bohannon wrote: 
> I am quite confused by the whole process of compiling and installing
> wrappers for C libraries.  It seems like I can get things to work OK
> without really knowing what I'm doing if everything is put and built
> in a single directory.  The hard part seems to be putting the right
> files in the right places and getting the path arguments correct.
> Then things stop working, and I have to really understand what's going
> on, but the manual doesn't explain this part of the process in any
> detail.

Have a look at ocamlmklib in the manual - if it's available on your platform
then it nicely hides away a lot of this.

<snip - steps 1-4 are fine>
> 5) Write "foo.ml" and use it to build "foo.cmxa" by running
> 
> ocamlopt -a -o foo.cmxa foo.ml
>   -ccopt -L/opt/local/lib -cclib -lfoo
>   -ccopt -L/usr/local/lib/ocaml/stubs -cclib -lfoo_stubs

This command will also build foo.cmx, foo.a and foo.o

> 6) Copy "foo.cmi" and "foo.cmxa" to their permanent location, let's
> say "/usr/local/lib/ocaml/foo/"

You should also copy foo.a to this directory which should fix the problem.
foo.cmxa contains information required by OCaml but the actual code is in
foo.a (as it's been natively compiled). Similarly, .cmx files contain
information which ocamlopt needs but the actual code is in .o (or .obj)
files. For native code, it's a code idea to copy the .cmx files too as it
allows ocamlopt to do some inlining (I think that's right...)

> 7) Write my file "bar.ml" that needs to use the library, and compile
> it by running
> 
> ocamlopt -I /usr/local/lib/ocaml/foo -o bar foo.cmxa bar.ml

This should now work without error.


David