I suspect that all the OCaml-on-Windows enthusiasts find their needs met by F#. Maybe interoperability between OCaml and F# is the way to go on Windows.
Gaius ------------------ -----Original Message----- From: Alain Frisch <al...@frisch.fr> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:51:07 To: Martin DeMello<martindeme...@gmail.com> Cc: Gerd Stolpmann<i...@gerd-stolpmann.de>; Jonathan Protzenko<jonathan.protze...@gmail.com>; <caml-list@inria.fr> Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions On 12/13/2011 09:21 AM, Martin DeMello wrote: > it's a bit frustrating for me because i don't have or > use windows either, but if i develop an end user app i really want it > to be as cross-platform as possible. This attitude partially explains why support for OCaml under Windows lacks behind: people want it to work, because they somehow have to produce applications running under Windows, but they really don't like this OS and certainly don't want to invest time in learning its gory details in order to improve the situation with OCaml. I don't blame anyone here, and I'd probably avoid developing under Windows myself if this was not mandatory for our business. From what I hear, this is also the case for other industrial users of OCaml who needs Windows support. (And also for large projects like Coq, etc.) There are a few talented OCaml enthusiasts who know quite a lot about Windows and have put some energy in improving OCaml for this OS in the past. Thanks to them! As Xavier said, it would be great to find someone who'd like to join the core dev team in order to improve support for Windows. Anyone interested? But in order to get really good support in the long term, which includes community tools (packaging, porting libraries, support for Windows API and .Net, documentation, etc), I think we need to find a way to "bootstrap" a larger community of OCaml hobbyists, who consider Windows as their main platform. (It might be the case that "native Windows users" are culturally less inclined to participate to an open source project, but I don't believe this is the primary explanation for the lack of community work for Windows. We simply need more people on board.) Good support for OCaml under Windows would benefits not only to Windows users, as it might simply attract a lot more people to OCaml and it would probably make the life easier to those who are "forced" to produce Windows applications. So this questions should be of interest to the community as a whole. Do you guys have ideas on how to bootstrap a larger community of OCaml/Windows hobbyists? Alain -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
