Re: [Caml-list] Thoughts on targeting windows

[Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas@gazagnaire.org>]

> Indeed! I forgot about that last little bit.  We killed most of the C,
> but there's a bit left.  That said, those should be pretty portable,
> and can (and have been) stubbed out so it can work in a Javascript
> context.

Indeed, little changes are needed to compile core_kernel to javascript. See https://github.com/janestreet/core_kernel/pull/8

Thomas

> 
> y
> 
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 3:34 PM, Sebastien Mondet
> <sebastien.mondet@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Core_kernel is pure OCaml, and so should work fine on Windows (and
>>> Javascript!)
>>> 
>> 
>> Actually some dependencies of core_kernel have C code, like bin_prot:
>> https://github.com/janestreet/bin_prot/blob/master/lib/blit_stubs.c
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> y
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 11:23 AM, David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> William wrote:
>>>>> we are considering using OCaml for a rather large project,
>>>>> the bulk of which will be networking and encryption. OCaml
>>>>> seems to meet our needs with one exception: we'd like to
>>>>> target windows (as well as linux & mac) and we got the
>>>>> impression that this would be complicated -- we gathered
>>>>> that neither jane street's Core nor OPAM are windows compatible.
>>>> 
>>>> It's more complicated than Linux (& Mac), but not overly so.
>>>> 
>>>>> Would still recommend using OCaml? Are there workarounds, or
>>>>> other libraries that would replace Core?
>>>> 
>>>> I believe Core_kernel aims to be the platform-neutral parts of core?
>>>> There are other Jane Street libs which compile just fine on Windows.
>>>> Batteries, as others have noted, works out of the box. Usually, I find that
>>>> the biggest problem in third party libs is in build systems (becoming less
>>>> so with Oasis, OCamlbuild and so on) making naïve decisions about Windows
>>>> but that doesn't usually take much patching.
>>>> 
>>>> Most of what I do is Windows-oriented, but some of what I've done is
>>>> Windows and Linux. My experience is that it's important to keep Windows in
>>>> the picture early on to avoid pain later - so ensure that daily builds are
>>>> working on Windows or perhaps that one of your developers is always working
>>>> on Windows or something... that should avoid accidentally selecting a
>>>> Unix-only library and only realising that a painfully long way down the road
>>>> (or that the library you thought was cross-platform contains an assert false
>>>> for the function you need when running on Windows!). If you write something
>>>> which works on Windows in OCaml it will probably translate with little pain
>>>> to Linux but the reverse isn't necessarily true.
>>>> 
>>>> While OPAM is great, I personally find that downloading and compiling a
>>>> library, even by hand, represents an insignificant amount of time compared
>>>> with reading its documentation, evaluating its samples and so on in the
>>>> overall process of working out whether I want to use a component... but
>>>> apparently the pain of not having a package manager really, really, really
>>>> hurts people coming from the Unix world ;o)
>>>> 
>>>> HTH,
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> David
>>>> 
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>> 
> 
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