Windows, Godi, Findlib and all that

Windows, Godi, Findlib and all that

[Yaron Minsky]

I've been trying to figure out what the state of OCaml on Windows is,
and I'm wondering if anyone on the list can help me out.  I've been
trying to get godi, findlib and integration with MS excel going at the
same time.  The problem is that these approaches appear at first
glance to be incompatible.  Here are the dependencies that I know
about.

1. Godi works only on cygwin, and isn't supported even with mingw.
2. Findlib works with cygwin -or- mingw, but doesn't work with the native build
3. The real windows support (win32 libraries and ocamole, the latter
of which provides Excel integration), only work with the native build.

Does anyone have a sense of whether any of these issues can be
overcome?  How much work, for instance, would it take to get findlib
working on the native win32 build?  How about Godi?  How about getting
theings like ocamole working with the mingw build?

Thanks,
Yaron Minsky

Re: [Caml-list] Windows, Godi, Findlib and all that

[Gerd Stolpmann]

Am Mittwoch, den 26.10.2005, 09:32 -0400 schrieb Yaron Minsky:
> I've been trying to figure out what the state of OCaml on Windows is,
> and I'm wondering if anyone on the list can help me out.  I've been
> trying to get godi, findlib and integration with MS excel going at the
> same time.  The problem is that these approaches appear at first
> glance to be incompatible.  Here are the dependencies that I know
> about.
> 
> 1. Godi works only on cygwin, and isn't supported even with mingw.

Porting Godi to mingw has become quite important. It is now
top-priority, but apparently not simple. A lot of preliminary work has
already been done, especially getting rid of all the C helper programs
(this is not yet released, though), so the port has only to deal with
O'Caml programs and shell scripts.

However, there is no solution in the short term. I expect the release of
the mingw port in summer 2006.

> 2. Findlib works with cygwin -or- mingw, but doesn't work with the native build

This should be doable. Findlib is a pure O'Caml program, and the system
side is very simple. Although I don't know what is going wrong, I
suspect the calling conventions of external programs are different.
Findlib executes ocamlc as subprocess.

> 3. The real windows support (win32 libraries and ocamole, the latter
> of which provides Excel integration), only work with the native build.

I have actually no idea whether this can be ported to mingw, or whether
one can at least link mingw- and msvc-generated libraries together. The
mingw web site says this is possible.

Gerd

> Does anyone have a sense of whether any of these issues can be
> overcome?  How much work, for instance, would it take to get findlib
> working on the native win32 build?  How about Godi?  How about getting
> theings like ocamole working with the mingw build?
> 
> Thanks,
> Yaron Minsky
> 
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