Re: [Caml-list] Building large and portable projects

[Christian Lindig <lindig@cs.uni-sb.de>]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 09:25:49PM -0800, David Brown wrote:
> I still haven't found anything nicer than gnatmake, the builder for Gnu
> Ada.  A common compilation line:
> 
>   gnatmake mainmodule
 

There is an inherent tension between large projects and writing a tool
like gnatmake: large projects are not entirely written in OCaml, or any
other single language. 

While it is possible to write a tool that is smart about OCaml, it can't
know about about all the other tools you are using to generate
documentation, or to generate OCaml code from some specification
language. A make replacement therefore must be language-neutral. You
still could write a tool that handles recompilation of pure OCaml
projects but you would have to use it from a language-neutral make
replacement in truly large projects.

Ocamldep is a simple example for such a tool: it is smart about OCaml
but it emits Make syntax and does not try to solve the problem that Make
can solve better.

-- Christian

-- 
Christian Lindig         http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/~lindig/

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