Re: [Caml-list] Self contained Windows executable?

[Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org>]

On Mon, May 19, 2014, Jonathan Protzenko wrote:
> Shameless plug: there's a blog post at gagallium's which recaps the 
> various versions of OCaml on windows 
> <http://gallium.inria.fr/~scherer/gagallium/the-ocaml-installer-for-windows/>.
> 
> tl;dr :
> - the "ocaml" package from the cygwin distribution is a cygwin program 
> which generates cygwin executables -- these depend on cygwin1.dll to run
> - the installer from http://protz.github.com/ocaml-installer/ is a 
> native windows program, which generates native windows program -- these 
> do not need anything specific to execute.

And it works well. :) 
(although I had to do a couple weird things to have it really integrate
with win-builds)

> The second option does also require cygwin, however, as most of the 
> ecosystem (e.g. ocamlbuild) assumes a unix-like environment.

Nitpick: ocamlbuild doesn't really assume a unix-like environment. It
implements 'cp' through 'system("cp...")' (fixable) and runs
user-defined commands through Sys.command too which is cmd.exe on
Windows and has completely different escaping rules and therefore wraps
them first inside a call to an sh.exe. Unfortunately that last point
will require breaking compat to fix well (commands would be provided as
a string array à la Unix.create_process, not as a string).

-- 
Adrien Nader