Re: [Caml-list] Caml on intel-OSX

[John Skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 18:20 +0200, padiolea@irisa.fr wrote:

> > Lol! no, it is a simple question. Can I make a bytecode program
> > and just ship it an expect it to run? No. So what else is required?
> 
> I guess that if your bytecode program require some external libraries,
> such as for instance if you do a "open Dbm"  then you must
> have too this library.
> I think that ocamlrun only include code to handle the Pervasive
> library.

The code uses only (a) the standard library (Hashtbl and so on),
(b) the Unix library, and (c) Bignums. Therefore the bytecode
only requires support to be found in the standard distribution.

I have a suspicion that one needs to '-custom' link somehow,
to make a suitable single bytecode interpreter. The desire
here is to *avoid* building Ocaml from source on the
target platform, instead to use pre-built binaries,
or, at worst, build these binaries from source,
excluding the full Ocaml toolkit -- the compiler isn't
required since the program is already compiled
to bytecode.

Both myself and my friend are trying to build the Felix
system on diverse platforms, and make it available easily
to potential users: this includes not only Unix like systems,
but also Windows, Apple, and IBM platforms. At present, he 
has got his hands on an Intel/Mac platform for a very limited time,
(at the actual release conference) previously we worked
on an IBM PPC64/Linux platform, G4 and G5 OSX platforms,
and I'm trying to make the system build on native 
Windows Win32 (XP) without Cygwin, using  MSVC++ compiler 
and prebuilt Ocaml .. as well as trying to make both
a Godi and Debian packages ... I wait with dread the release
of 64 bit XP ..

So we're looking at ways to get the system up and running
on new and weird platforms with the minimum of fuss.
Both for ourselves as developers, and for end users.

Whilst I personally prefer the ocaml native code compiler,
at present I can't use it on my AMD64 as there appears
to be a code generation bug in it for that platform --
so I'm using bytecode even for core development,
(and it's a real pain for the Debian packaging .. since
the system autodetects the native code compiler and tries
to use it even though it doesn't work: there is no 
opportunity to intervene manually in Debian autobuilds)

So we're looking at ways to get the system up and running
on new and weird platforms with the minimum of fuss.
Both for ourselves as developers, and for end users.
Solving this problem 'satisfactorily' seems harder
than writing a compiler :)

-- 
John Skaller, skaller at users.sf.net
PO Box 401 Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia Ph:61-2-96600850 
Download Felix here: http://felix.sf.net