On 12/14/2011 07:03 AM, Alain Frisch wrote:
On 12/13/2011 10:53 AM, Adrien wrote:
On 13/12/2011, Alain Frisch<[email protected]> wrote:
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?
In my experience, OCaml is working mostly fine on Windows. I can see
some issues but nothing huge. Do you have some examples?
It is very good to hear about some successful experiences with OCaml
under Windows!
Needless to say, but at LexiFi we are also very happy with OCaml under
Windows.
That said, the situation probably needs to be improved in order to
attract a larger audience. Many users complain about not being able to
install and use OCaml under Windows in reasonable amount of time. And
the binary packages for Windows tend to lack behind official releases
of OCaml.
As a concrete problem, until a few days ago, the mingw port could not
be used with recent versions of Cygwin without some small hacks (like
copying manually /bin/gcc-3.exe into gcc.exe, and passing more
directories to flexlink). No big deal, but it can discourage beginners.
A more serious issue is the lack of support for ocamlfind, GODI, and
many libraries around for Windows. Also, ocamlbuild does not play
very nicely with Windows. A related point: the assumption is generally
made that OCaml developpers under Windows need to have a running
Cygwin installation. This is a huge barrier to entry. It would take
some time to address this, but there is really no reason why
ocamlbuild, for instance, should rely on an external Unix-like shell
(I believe the only reason today is to rely on bash for quoting
arguments!). And it is not difficult to adapt the build system for
most libraries to avoid any dependency on Unix-like tools (using
either ocamlbuild or omake). It just takes time to do so (and to
maintain the result).
For the native compiler, we need an external toolchain, but this is
not a huge issue. With some little amount of work, one could support
a standalone msys/mingw (as opposed to mingw compilers packaged in Cygwin)
This is precisely what http://protz.github.com/ocaml-installer/
provides. Is that not what you're describing here?
and it would be interesting to come up with a minimal mingw
distribution (only with a C compiler, assembler, etc, as required by
ocamlopt) that could be packaged together with OCaml.
Looks a little bit more involved but not un-feasible. Would you be
interested in helping me maintain such a port? ;-)
Cheers,
jonathan
--
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
