Re: [Caml-list] Ocaml on windows

[Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org>]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013, David Allsopp wrote:
> Bikal Gurung wrote:
> > Hi David,
> >
> > Thank you for your response. I have installed the official windows port of ocaml at
> > http://protz.github.io/ocaml-installer/ . However, it mentions that MinGW/Msys is no longer supported.
> > I rather use Mingw/Msys as well.
> 
> I meant I use the MinGW port of the compiler rather than the MSVC port - I compile it using the mingw-w64 compilers provided with Cygwin. I only use Cygwin to compile OCaml and related libraries (again, principally for historical reasons, I develop using a normal command shell with GnuWin32 to provide Unix commands). Building using Cygwin (i.e. the supported way) has the benefit that when you get stuck, others are likely to (be able to) help! :o) Do you have a particular to want to use MSYS rather than Cygwin?

By the way, wtch out for GnuWin32. It advertises a very broad support
but it's getting old and most importantly, it lies on several things.
For instance, fork() is implemented as:
  int fork(void) {
    return -1;
  }

> > It seems ocamlbuild requires cygwin to work, has this been your experience too? If I build the latest
> > ocaml from trunk - 4.02dev+fp will ocaml and other tools/utilities still work on pure MingWg/Msys
> > environment?
> 
> Yes. Because I use GnuWin32 (which has its bin folder in my PATH) I prefer not to put C:\cygwin\bin in my PATH but symlink through the required utilities in C:\Dev\OCaml\bin (C:\Dev\OCaml is my installation root for OCaml) - my OCaml installation requires bash.exe (for ocamlbuild), cpp.exe (for ocamlnet) and i686-w64-mingw32-ar.exe + i686-w64-mingw32-as.exe + i686-w64-mingw32-dlltool.exe + i686-w64-mingw32-gcc.exe + i686-w64-mingw32-ranlib.exe for ocamlopt.

Do you mean you use gnuwin32's bash.exe for ocamlbuild?

I hadn't thought about doing that but it could be a pretty good match.
It's probably faster to spawn than cygwin or msys' bash and probably has
way less dependencies.

-- 
Adrien Nader