Re : Re : [Caml-list] Road to native windows OCaml...

[Adrien <camaradetux@gmail.com>]

2008/10/14, Dmitry Bely <dmitry.bely@gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 1:41 PM, Adrien <camaradetux@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>> Can I ask what the motivation is for this (out of interest, not
>>>> criticism)?
>>>
>>> Maybe because if you want to distribute executables using cygwin you
>>> have to release your code under a GPL compatible license [1].
>>>
>>> Daniel
>>>
>>> [1] http://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-3.10/notes/README.win32
>>
>> I would give another explanation : cygwin is big and slow.
>> A base cygwin install is at least 1GB (when fully configured, after
>> carefully reviewing *each* package), a regular one is 2GB. XP itself
>> is not that big, I've not seen many applications that big, only CAD
>> ones.
>
> No way. My Cygwin installation (quite enough for building Ocaml and
> many other things) is just 274Mb. Not a big deal.

I have to say I am really surprised. All the cygwin installations I've
seen were terribly big, with tens of thousands of files, if not
hundreds of thousands. Would you (and/or David) mind sharing you
configuration file ? (the one created at the root of the package
cache, don't remember the name). The point is not that I don't believe
you, I just want to *know*. I guess the difference is that I also
installed other development tools and libraries

>> Cygwin is also slow, though it will probably not impact a student use
>> (networking is slower due to the translation, I have mldonkey in
>> mind).
>
> What exactly is slow when building Ocaml? make? Can you prove that?

I won't prove that as I've not said *that*. You're talking about
something very specific whereas I said something much more general.
I'd like to say cygwin slowness is universally known but I'd be told
I'm not proving anything. The point is that every operation that
requires the cygwin translation layer is slow.
Of course, if you don't use anything ocaml doesn't already provide, it
won't be slow (but that wouldn't prove cygwin is not slow). Now, if
you don't need to deliver/provide/release/... an application that
specifically targets windows, I don't really get why you're running
ocaml on windows, use a real linux installation, get a virtual machine
(virtualbox is great), use ocamljava (which is great !). But anyway.

>> ./configure are also painfully slow, the need to run several
>> small commands where startup time is more important than runtime gives
>> cygwin no chance [1].
>
> Where did you find any ./configure script used for building the native
> Win32 Ocaml?

Again, ocaml is not the only application in the world, nor the *one* I
was referring to. Even though this is the ocaml mailing-list and the
topic is definitely about ocaml, there exist other things with which
ocaml has to interact.
And just for the report, you can run the ./configure scripts (they
don't give you correct results but are mostly working) and, yes, they
are slower.


 ---

Adrien Nader

>
> - Dmitry Bely
>
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