OCaml 3.12.0+beta1 on Cygwin 1.7.5

[Taylor Venable <tcvena@gmail.com>]

Hi there, I'm thinking of writing some programs in OCaml to assist a
custom build infrastructure (currently 95% Tcl, 5% external Lua
programs) that we use at work.  Since we build on Windows, Mac, and
Linux I have to make sure that whatever I end up writing works in all
three.  I haven't written much OCaml in my life, and the little that I
did was probably five years ago, but any tools I write will have to be
usable for a while.  So I tried compiling OCaml 3.12.0+beta1 in Cygwin
1.7.5 -- the information I found about it seemed to imply that it
should work.  I put flexdll in the PATH and I was able to use the
configure script and "make world.opt" with only a single problem:
there were lots of linker errors when it came to building
tools/objinfo_helper.exe, symbols like _lbasename, _sch_istable, and
_objalloc_free could not be found.  [I'd paste the full error but I
forgot to email it to my private address today and the machine is in
corporate lockdown mode, so I can't access it right now, but I can
obtain it tomorrow at work if anybody would like to see the full
message.]  The way to fix it, for me anyway, was to modify the
definition of LIBBFD_LINK in config/Makefile (which started out as
"-lbfd -ldl") to append to it "-lintl -lz /usr/lib/libiberty.a"; and
after that everything worked.  I don't know if that constitutes a
problem with the configure script or just something about how my
Cygwin is installed, but I wanted to mention it somewhere in case it
was a bug.

In addition to that, I have a question: is bytecode compatible across
operating systems and/or CPU architectures?  In other words, if I
compile to bytecode on Linux/x86, can I run that using ocamlrun on
Windows/x86 or Linux/amd64?

Thanks,

-- 
Taylor C. Venable
http://metasyntax.net/