Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions

[Jonathan Protzenko <jonathan.protzenko@gmail.com>]

On 12/14/2011 07:03 AM, Alain Frisch wrote:
> On 12/13/2011 10:53 AM, Adrien wrote:
>> On 13/12/2011, Alain Frisch<alain@frisch.fr>  wrote:
>>> As Xavier said, it would be great to find someone who'd like to join 
>>> the
>>> core dev team in order to improve support for Windows. Anyone 
>>> interested?
>>
>> In my experience, OCaml is working mostly fine on Windows. I can see
>> some issues but nothing huge. Do you have some examples?
>
> It is very good to hear about some successful experiences with OCaml 
> under Windows!
>
> Needless to say, but at LexiFi we are also very happy with OCaml under 
> Windows.
>
>
> That said, the situation probably needs to be improved in order to 
> attract a larger audience. Many users complain about not being able to 
> install and use OCaml under Windows in reasonable amount of time.  And 
> the binary packages for Windows tend to lack behind official releases 
> of OCaml.
>
> As a concrete problem, until a few days ago, the mingw port could not 
> be used with recent versions of Cygwin without some small hacks (like 
> copying manually /bin/gcc-3.exe into gcc.exe, and passing more 
> directories to flexlink).  No big deal, but it can discourage beginners.
>
> A more serious issue is the lack of support for ocamlfind, GODI, and 
> many libraries around for Windows.  Also, ocamlbuild does not play 
> very nicely with Windows. A related point: the assumption is generally 
> made that OCaml developpers under Windows need to have a running 
> Cygwin installation. This is a huge barrier to entry. It would take 
> some time to address this, but there is really no reason why 
> ocamlbuild, for instance, should rely on an external Unix-like shell
> (I believe the only reason today is to rely on bash for quoting 
> arguments!).  And it is not difficult to adapt the build system for 
> most libraries to avoid any dependency on Unix-like tools (using 
> either ocamlbuild or omake). It just takes time to do so (and to 
> maintain the result).
>
> For the native compiler, we need an external toolchain, but this is 
> not a huge issue.  With some little amount of work, one could support 
> a standalone msys/mingw (as opposed to mingw compilers packaged in Cygwin)
This is precisely what http://protz.github.com/ocaml-installer/ 
provides. Is that not what you're describing here?
> and it would be interesting to come up with a minimal mingw 
> distribution (only with a C compiler, assembler, etc, as required by 
> ocamlopt) that could be packaged together with OCaml.
Looks a little bit more involved but not un-feasible. Would you be 
interested in helping me maintain such a port? ;-)

Cheers,

jonathan