Re: [Caml-list] Re: Road to native windows OCaml...

[Kuba Ober <kuba@mareimbrium.org>]

On Tuesday 14 October 2008, Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
> 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).

And you need masm too, right?

You're right of course, for whatever reasons I was still thinking of OCaml
built with Cygwin :)

Cheers, Kuba