Re: [Caml-list] Thoughts on targeting windows

[Sebastien Mondet <sebastien.mondet@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com> wrote:

> Core_kernel is pure OCaml, and so should work fine on Windows (and
> Javascript!)
>
>
Actually some dependencies of core_kernel have C code, like bin_prot:
https://github.com/janestreet/bin_prot/blob/master/lib/blit_stubs.c




> y
>
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 11:23 AM, David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>
> wrote:
> > William wrote:
> >> we are considering using OCaml for a rather large project,
> >> the bulk of which will be networking and encryption. OCaml
> >> seems to meet our needs with one exception: we'd like to
> >> target windows (as well as linux & mac) and we got the
> >> impression that this would be complicated -- we gathered
> >> that neither jane street's Core nor OPAM are windows compatible.
> >
> > It's more complicated than Linux (& Mac), but not overly so.
> >
> >> Would still recommend using OCaml? Are there workarounds, or
> >> other libraries that would replace Core?
> >
> > I believe Core_kernel aims to be the platform-neutral parts of core?
> There are other Jane Street libs which compile just fine on Windows.
> Batteries, as others have noted, works out of the box. Usually, I find that
> the biggest problem in third party libs is in build systems (becoming less
> so with Oasis, OCamlbuild and so on) making naïve decisions about Windows
> but that doesn't usually take much patching.
> >
> > Most of what I do is Windows-oriented, but some of what I've done is
> Windows and Linux. My experience is that it's important to keep Windows in
> the picture early on to avoid pain later - so ensure that daily builds are
> working on Windows or perhaps that one of your developers is always working
> on Windows or something... that should avoid accidentally selecting a
> Unix-only library and only realising that a painfully long way down the
> road (or that the library you thought was cross-platform contains an assert
> false for the function you need when running on Windows!). If you write
> something which works on Windows in OCaml it will probably translate with
> little pain to Linux but the reverse isn't necessarily true.
> >
> > While OPAM is great, I personally find that downloading and compiling a
> library, even by hand, represents an insignificant amount of time compared
> with reading its documentation, evaluating its samples and so on in the
> overall process of working out whether I want to use a component... but
> apparently the pain of not having a package manager really, really, really
> hurts people coming from the Unix world ;o)
> >
> > HTH,
> >
> >
> > David
> >
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