Re: [Caml-list] Ocaml on windows

[Malcolm Matalka <mmatalka@gmail.com>]

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Out of curiosity: why not opt for F#?
On Jun 24, 2013 12:11 PM, "Jonathan Protzenko" <jonathan.protzenko@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Mon 24 Jun 2013 12:01:06 PM CEST, Bikal Gurung wrote:
> > Hi David,
> >
> > Thank you for your response. I have installed the official windows
> > port of ocaml at http://protz.github.io/ocaml-installer/ . However, it
> > mentions that MinGW/Msys is no longer supported. I rather use
> > Mingw/Msys as well.
> There are quite a few things that make working with msys painful, which
> is the reason why I switched the installer to cygwin. The installer
> still is a 32-bit native windows program, and still generates 32-bit
> native windows programs. It's just that cygwin is an easy way to get a
> toolchain and a unix-like development environment, which ocaml kind of
> needs in order to work right (without it, you only get bytecode
> compilation).
> - The main problem is that OCaml is, by default, configured to search
> executables from the toolchain with the i686-pc-mingw-whatever prefix,
> that is, the one that the mingw-w64 compilers have, when installed
> through cygwin.
> - The second biggest problem is with flexdll which, IIRC, hardcodes the
> use of the mingw-w64 compilers (32-bit compilers from the mingw-w64
> project). Msys, on the other hand, uses the mingw compilers (the
> original mingw project), and the location of the libraries /
> executables is slightly different, or maybe flexdll doesn't auto-detect
> the right locations for crt2.o and friends, meaning it's painful as you
> have to manually export FLEXLINKFLAGS. At some point, it became almost
> impossible to have that combination working. I think flexdll started to
> hardcode the i686-pc-mingw prefix at some point, and there's no
> ready-made, easy to install mingw-w64/msys bundle available, as far as
> I know.
> - OCamlbuild relies on bash being available in the path to run its
> external commands ; an easy way to have this is to have a cygwin
> development environment. This is a know issue that no one has stepped
> up to fix on windows.
> - Finally, the quoting conventions, IIRC, are subtly different between
> mingw/msys and cygwin, and OCaml is tailored to cygwin.
>
> For all these reasons, cygwin sounds like a better choice for you
> working environment on windows. But I believe msys is still possible.
> If there's something that prevents you from having it work properly, I
> think we (the team) would be happy to know about it.
>
> Cheers,
>
> jonathan
> >
> > It seems ocamlbuild requires cygwin to work, has this been your
> > experience too? If I build the latest ocaml from trunk - 4.02dev+fp
> > will ocaml and other tools/utilities still work on pure MingWg/Msys
> > environment?
> >
> > With regards to ocaml libraries, have you tried the Jane Street
> > packages? Core, core_kernel ?
> >
> > Bikal Gurung
> >
> >
> > On 24 June 2013 10:27, David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com
> > <mailto:dra-news@metastack.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     Bikal Gurung wrote:
> >     > I am looking to use ocaml to implement a project for my
> >     employer. However,
> >     > the environment is Windows OS. I am using cygwin and so far it
> >     seems to
> >     > work but curious on experiences others have on using ocaml on
> >     windows -
> >     > both as a development and deployment platform. Also has anyone
> >     tried using
> >     > opam on windows? Does it work?
> >
> >     I've used the MinGW Windows port of OCaml for nearly a decade.
> >     Deployment of programs is the same as deploying anything else on
> >     Windows - deploying using executables built with ocamlopt is of
> >     course trivial as they have no dependencies beyond any libraries
> >     you choose to use.
> >
> >     Partly because of how long I've used OCaml, I still build it from
> >     sources - but there are now several options including the packaged
> >     Windows installer, GODI/WODI, etc. Although Windows OCaml users
> >     are a minority, there are quite a few developers actively
> >     contributing (the recent 64-bit MinGW port was
> >     community-initiated, I think).
> >
> >     Last time I looked, Windows support for opam appeared to be a todo
> >     list item, but I haven't looked in a while (laziness... I already
> >     have parallel build scripts of my own, so a package manager is
> >     lower down my priority list)
> >
> >     HTH,
> >
> >
> >     David
> >
> >
>
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