[Caml-list] About the "mingw" port of OCaml

[Alain Frisch <alain@frisch.fr>]

Dear caml-list,

The mingw port of OCaml was not in a good shape, because of changes in 
Cygwin:

   - We used to rely on the normal Cygwin gcc compiler, using the
     -mno-cygwin flag. This is no longer available for recent versions
     of gcc shipped in Cygwin. There is still a gcc-3.exe, but it
     is not clear whether it will be supported in the future.

   - There are now two modern versions of gcc, available in cygwin,
     which supports compiling in "mingw" mode (32-bit mode):

       * A packaged version of the compiler from the MinGW.org project:
         i686-pc-mingw32-gcc.exe

       * A packaged version of the compiler from the mingw-w64 project:
         i686-w64-mingw32-gcc


Future versions of the OCaml mingw port should be based on one of these 
two versions.  I'd be interested to hear if anyone in the community has 
any advice on which one to choose.  Feel free to comment on this list, 
or on the bug tracker:

    http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5179

Currently, flexdll (version 0.27) and OCaml (SVN trunk version) have 
been adapted to work with the mingw-w64 version (32-bit only, for now), 
but if there are arguments in favor of the other one, it should not be 
difficult to switch (supporting both is not technically difficult, but 
it might create useless confusion).

It would also be very useful to get some community feedback about the 
current version (OCaml trunk + flexdll version 0.27).


Alain