Re: [Caml-list] Running ocaml programs on Windows

[Dmitry Grebeniuk <gdsfh1@gmail.com>]

Hello.

> What is the "best" (simplest both for the programmer and, most importantly, the
> end user) way to develop a program in Ocaml in order to distribute it to people
> having only MS Windows platforms ?

  If you want to just distribute your program, you can get
cross-compilers.  They will make the binaries that you
can distribute, of course.
  If you want to test your program (to see whether it runs,
at least!), assure the quality of your program in some
ways -- the cross-compiling is not enough, and you
should use the real windows installation or some kind
of a virtual machine.  This is caused by the differences
between many windows versions, currently installed
"windows updates", software versions (for example,
the version of installed ActiveState Tcl/Tk package
for GUI OCaml programs).

> Is there some kind of tool that could
> automatically wrap a command-line-based app into a click-to-launch app (with
> some additionnal pop-ups to enter arguments for ex) ?

  The best way is to distribute a tcl/tk-powered application
with a fair GUI (and with the tcl/tk itself).
  Also the "wish" utility from tcl/tk does exist in windows
tcl/tk installation (AFAIR), you can use it too, for simple
GUIs, for just "prompt and go" wrappers.
  Lablgtk2 is good too.
  Avoid the .bat/.cmd files generation (Sys.command too),
since cmd (the windows shell) uses some
incomprehensible ways to handle the quotes. It's more
safe to write some utility in ocaml+labltk that passes
command line options to the real working program with
Unix.create_process-like functions (the functions that
receive the argv[] list! arguments shouldn't be concat'ed
to the string).

  As for ocaml-windows-mingw-32bit developement, you
can use my project "overbld": http://overbld.sourceforge.net/ ,
it provides installers for some variants of OCaml+libraries
distribution.  I will add/fix libraries to/in the distribution.
(compiler in the overbld distribution will be updated when
OCaml 3.13 will be released, in 1..2 weeks from the OCaml
release).
  It's easy for me, since I'm fighting this issue (windows,
ocaml, libraries) for a long time.
  64 bits are not required for my windows applications, so
I'm not adding/compiling 64-bit version of overbld.  But it is
not a very hard task, as I have seen, since OCaml runs on
mingw64.  (Really, I saw it On The Internets!).