Re: iPhone development

[Jeffrey Scofield <dynasticon@mac.com>]

Yitzhak Mandelbaum <yitzhakm@CS.Princeton.EDU> writes:

> Back in May there was a brief discussion about developing for the
> iPhone in OCaml.   Does anyone from that discussion, or anyone else,
> have any updates on the process/experience?

Greetings.

We're nearing completion of our first OCaml iPhone app.  It's been
fantastic coding the app in OCaml.  But on the other hand, there's a
lot of work to make that possible.  In the long term, however, I
expect it will turn out to have been a great decision.

With Apple's release of iPhoneOS 3.0 we found that our previous
(somewhat hackish) patches were no longer working.  We have a new set of
patches to OCaml 3.10.2 that adopt the OCaml 3.12 register assignments
for ARM, and are a little more properly integrated with the OCaml code
generator.  In particular, the register assignments (as in OCaml 3.12)
avoid use of registers reserved to the OS.  We can report that this
works perfectly under both iPhoneOS 2.2.1 and iPhoneOS 3.0.  So things
are looking good for the OCaml 3.12 release as a basis for cross
compilation to the iPhone.

>  Some specific questions:
>
> 1. Does anyone know of any open-source code that helps to interface
>     OCaml with Cocoa?

No, sorry.  We wrote our own code to do this.

> 2. In May, Jeff Scofield posted a patch to 3.10.2 for cross compiling
> to the arm processor. What about 3.11.x?

Since the ARM code generator is completely revamped for OCaml 3.12 we
are currently planning to skip the 3.11 release.

Regards,

Jeff Scofield
Seattle