Re: [Caml-list] GODI News: RocketBoost Beta

[Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

Am Montag, den 16.06.2008, 08:39 +0200 schrieb Alain Frisch:
> Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
> > The big news is that GODI now supports the MinGW port of OCaml for
> > Windows (besides the Cygwin port). This means that it is now possible to
> > create native Windows applications with GODI.
> 
> That's really great news!
> 
> > A lot of the porting effort was about Cygwin interoperability.
> > godi_console (which is a native Win32 binary) can translate Cygwin paths
> > to native Windows paths (by reading the Cygwin mount table in the
> > registry).
> 
> This feature might be useful for other projects. Do you plan to make it 
> available as a stand-alone library (maybe together with other 
> Windows-related hacks)? 

Currently I don't have such plans. For now, just get the library from 
https://godirepo.camlcity.org/svn/godi-bootstrap/godi-tools/trunk/console-src/godi-sys-win32/ (module Godi_file, in the parallel dir godi-sys-unix there is an implementation for POSIX).

> Does it support Cygwin symlinks?

It can read and resolve symlinks. For creating symlinks it just calls
Cygwin's /bin/ln for now.

> > * Ocaml does not install ocamldep.opt.exe
> > 
> > in the MinGW port. Maybe an oversight?
> 
> Already fixed in CVS HEAD (many of the Makefiles are now shared between 
> Unix and Windows ports).

Cool.

> > * No support for ocamlmklib
> > 
> > A lot of work has been put into working around the missing ocamlmklib.
> > The difficulty is that stub libraries need to be compiled with different
> > flags when a DLL is to be produced, i.e. the C compiler is invoked
> > differently in this case.
> 
> This is no longer true with the version in CVS HEAD, to become 3.11. Now 
> there is some hackery at link time to allow using the same set of object 
> files for linking statically or dynamically (for stub code dlls). Also, 
> ocamlmklib is available for all the Windows ports.

That's great. Thanks for doing that. I'll see how to integrate flexdll -
is it needed before ocaml is built, or can it be installed later? (That
looks like a bootstrap problem.)

> > There are no clear rules how to quote arguments in Windows (cmd.exe).
> 
> Indeed. I've found that it is sometimes necessary (and it seems to be 
> always sufficient) to add extra quotes around the whole command line.
> E.g. to call emacs on a file "foo bar" (without the quotes) from OCaml, 
> here what I do:
> 
> Sys.command "\"\"C:\\Program Files\\emacs-22.1\\bin\\emacs\" \"foo bar\"\""
> 
> That is, one passes this command line to cmd.exe:
> 
> ""C:\Program Files\emacs-22.1\bin\emacs" "foo bar""
> 
> As weird as it may look, the quotes around the program and argument 
> names are not escaped.

Interesting. Nevertheless, really helpful is only something predictable.
There is no good information from Microsoft.

Gerd
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