Re: Road to native windows OCaml...

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

On 14-10-2008, Kuba Ober <kuba@mareimbrium.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 October 2008, David Allsopp wrote:
>> Kuba Ober wrote:
>> > I've looked briefly at what it'd take to have OCaml
>> > fully working natively (with mingw/VS), without any Cygwin
>> > needed for compilation.
>>
>> Can I ask what the motivation is for this (out of interest, not criticism)?
>> It only takes a matter of minutes to install Cygwin and it can be
>> completely ignored once OCaml is compiled (I don't even have Cygwin in my
>> PATH).
>
> The motivation is that I'm allergic to Cygwin. And you're not quite right that
> Cygwin is not needed later on: it is if you need to generate native code,
> or link with native code.
>

Not at all. Once compiled, ocaml doesn't use cygwin anymore. With maybe
the big exception of some little thing in ocambuild, that should be
fixed in ocaml 3.11 (something like needing "tput"). 

For example, if you download and install OCaml MSVC from
http://caml.inria.fr and you open a MS Visual Studio 2005 MSDOS shell,
you can perfectly compile a native application (well I have not done it,
but I will try tomorrow ;-)

All you need is "cl", "ml" and "link" I think (all are MSVC tools).

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall