On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Alain Frisch <alain@frisch.fr> wrote:
The graphical toplevel does not depend on labltk, so the two issues are really unrelated.  For crashes with the OCamlWin.exe, I was thinking about http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=4399 and http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=3052, but this might be pure FUD. The real problem is that nobody seems interested enough in this graphical toplevel to put serious work on it.

I beg to differ. In my experience, the Graphics module is a wonderful tool to get non-programming beginners interested in OCaml. I have been in the position of teaching OCaml to beginners, and the single thing they remember and found *fun* was displaying the mandelbrot fractal, and then playing with different color functions to get fancy results.

I absolutely agree that Graphics is not the most important thing in OCaml, and would be very happy to have a decent OCaml installer without it, but still I think in a second time making it work would be well worth it.


I will probably look for ledit (or lwt toplevel) which seems a better
alternative to emacs (too heavy too install).

If your hope is to make OCaml accessible to beginner hobbyists under Windows (I assume this is the primary audience for pre-compiled binaries), you might still want to provide easy ways to use code editors. Providing easy access only to the toplevel (be it graphical, or with a line-editor) might be a turnoff for beginners.

In most French "classes préparatoires", students learn programming by -- after a quick exposure to Maple, to be sure they don't risk learning too much functional programming -- typing code directly in the toplevel. Advanced software engineering there means "writing code in a notepad so that the work isn't lost when the toplevel crashes". But it's not directly relevant, as they still use Caml Light.

I agree that an Emacs integration would be useful, but maybe it could also provide an ocaml-mode for one of the simpler, less powerful editors with syntax highlighting and a shortcut to call the compiler. In GNU/Linux land, those would be Gedit and Kate; I'm not sure what Windows people use now.
(There was also a discussion of Eclipse plugin, but I suspect this isn't ready and would be a lot of work, so it's probably better to separate the two efforts)