Re: O'Caml 3.00 under Cygwin?

[Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>]

> I have taken a first crack at getting O'Caml 3.00 to compile and run under
> Cygwin,

Funny you mention this, because I completed a Cygwin port of OCaml a
few weeks ago and merged it back in the working sources.
Interested parties can get the working sources from the CVS repository
(http://camlcvs.inria.fr/), although you should keep in mind that
this are alpha-quality code, not ready for release.

What works:
- "./configure; make world; make install".
- The native-code compiler.
- The replay debugger.
- Many of the external libraries (Unix, Str, Num, Dynlink, Bigarray).

What doesn't work yet:
- None of the threads library works; bytecode threads hang in select()
  apparently, and system threads don't compile because Cygwin doesn't
  implement a large enough subset of POSIX threads (e.g. they left out
  condition variables and thread-specific data).  Don't expect a fix soon.
- The configuration for LablTk fails to find Tcl/Tk, but this shouldn't
  be too hard to fix.
- No GUI for the toplevel.
- No Graphics library.

> I would be interested in comparing notes and patches with anyone who has
> tried this. I am particularly interested in getting the debugger to work
> reliably.

It took me a while, but I got it to work reliably (I think).
Initially, I attributed the crashes to bugs in the Cygwin socket code,
but actually Cygwin is innocent and this was just a text file vs
binary file issue (with rather strange consequences!).

- Xavier Leroy