RE: [Caml-list] Ocaml on windows

[David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>]

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.

I meant I use the MinGW port of the compiler rather than the MSVC port - I compile it using the mingw-w64 compilers provided with Cygwin. I only use Cygwin to compile OCaml and related libraries (again, principally for historical reasons, I develop using a normal command shell with GnuWin32 to provide Unix commands). Building using Cygwin (i.e. the supported way) has the benefit that when you get stuck, others are likely to (be able to) help! :o) Do you have a particular to want to use MSYS rather than Cygwin?

> 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?

Yes. Because I use GnuWin32 (which has its bin folder in my PATH) I prefer not to put C:\cygwin\bin in my PATH but symlink through the required utilities in C:\Dev\OCaml\bin (C:\Dev\OCaml is my installation root for OCaml) - my OCaml installation requires bash.exe (for ocamlbuild), cpp.exe (for ocamlnet) and i686-w64-mingw32-ar.exe + i686-w64-mingw32-as.exe + i686-w64-mingw32-dlltool.exe + i686-w64-mingw32-gcc.exe + i686-w64-mingw32-ranlib.exe for ocamlopt.

> With regards to ocaml libraries, have you tried the Jane Street packages? Core, core_kernel ? 

No - I'd got the impression that their library was very Unix-oriented (though I think core_kernel may now address that?) Again, it's mainly laziness - I've been using OCaml for long enough that I already have my own core library so while switching to a supported one may be great, nothing's broken (yet!). The libraries I do use are: findlib, extlib, calendar, pcre, csv, batteries, pgocaml, camlzip, ssl, cryptokit, ocamlnet, json-wheel, json-static, spiderCaml, ocamlsha, ocamldap with natively compiled C libraries (for openssl, zlib, etc.) where appropriate.


David