Hello,

I compiled OCaml 3.10.0 on Windows XP SP2 using Cygwin and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.
Surprisingly, this did not go as smoothly as I thought. Hence I would like to share my experience:

1) the directory where the MSVC compiler, linker, and other tools are installed must be in the path : C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin
2) some tools (at least the compiler and linker) apparently need a DLL (mspdb80.dll), so one has to add "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE" to the path
3) under Cygwin, I had a clash between the linker (link) and the link command (link (GNU coreutils) 5.97). For everything to work, I had to remove the link command from Cygwin (renamed the link.exe file).
4) the compiler needs the INCLUDE variable to be defined with the MSVC include path (as well as Tcl's, but this is specified in the doc)
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\include;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\Include;C:\Tcl\include
5) for the linker, the variable is called LIB, and must contain:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\lib;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\Lib;C:\Tcl\lib

I would suggest to update the documentation (README.win32 file) by adding precisions concerning the INCLUDE, LIB and PATH variables, as well as the "link" command problem.

In addition, it seems that compilation can fail if OCAMLLIB is defined (complains about a .cmi in $OCAMLLIB not being up to date).


After compilation/installation, I tested this new version, compiling with "ocamlc.opt -pp camlp4o.opt". Is it still the right way to preprocess with Camlp4 ? Anyway, here's what I obtain:
  - in a class, "method private virtual" is not accepted anymore, the order has to be "method virtual private".
  - assert MySet.is_empty set; is not accepted anymore either, I have to add brackets: assert (MySet.is_empty set);
  - compiling a file containing this kind of comment (* <<<< COMMENT *) fails with "Quotation not terminated".
  - in a .mli, declaring an empty module ABC, with "module type ABC" does not work (but does without preprocessing).

I used the version from http://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-3.10/ocaml-3.10.0+beta.tar.gz, so maybe some things have been corrected since.


Matthieu