From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pBE9YHsf022093 for ; Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:34:17 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AtEAAGVs6E5KfVM2kGdsb2JhbABDqyAIIgEBAQEJCQ0HFAQhgXIBAQEEEgIkCAEbHAEBAwwGBQsNCRYPCQMCAQIBEREBBQEOAQ0GDQEFAgEBHodgmg4Ki2SCa4UTQIhxAgULg26IEASUdIcBhnM9g3k X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,351,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="123305159" Received: from mail-ee0-f54.google.com ([74.125.83.54]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/RC4-SHA; 14 Dec 2011 10:34:12 +0100 Received: by eekc50 with SMTP id c50so736939eek.27 for ; Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:34:12 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=message-id:date:from:user-agent:mime-version:to:cc:subject :references:in-reply-to:content-type:content-transfer-encoding; bh=7hNnbi1Oojq8Be1DLja0HokDlcWAo0avtQ/a+0ZEXeM=; b=Fu0/SdO9M/MJUMHJTeNqrf9bl8h/s9Hi8di8+aSA5DTboeouCLUHLU2SL4IrBzE+1g h6IAT4BJWvxRIYDKQcX4f615Hbw1zUVsIgpt+WGm5xjV7p7mdkS2PqnR+YRqRq0GvquB 5RnIFS5+23PUddnvetZwTZM2drP14GCKX1UhY= Received: by 10.205.139.76 with SMTP id iv12mr379525bkc.100.1323855252049; Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:34:12 -0800 (PST) Received: from ?IPv6:2a01:e35:2f37:f210:5e26:aff:fe0c:c1d8? ([2a01:e35:2f37:f210:5e26:aff:fe0c:c1d8]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id j9sm4406969bkd.2.2011.12.14.01.34.09 (version=SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:34:10 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <4EE86D90.6080409@gmail.com> Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:34:08 +0100 From: Jonathan Protzenko User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:11.0a1) Gecko/20111205 Thunderbird/11.0a1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Alain Frisch CC: Adrien , Martin DeMello , Gerd Stolpmann , caml-list@inria.fr References: <4EDE33A0.6070004@gmail.com> <1323760512.9833.9.camel@samsung> <4EE711FB.5020602@frisch.fr> <4EE83C26.7090108@frisch.fr> In-Reply-To: <4EE83C26.7090108@frisch.fr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions 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 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