RE: [Caml-list] Re: New version of the binary installer for Windows

[David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>]

Romain Bardou wrote:
> Le 30/03/2012 16:15, Jonathan Protzenko a écrit :
> > Hi again,
> >
> > Following all the good suggestions in this thread, I've updated the
> > installer. It now downloads and runs cygwin's setup.exe so as to
> > provide a fully working environment for OCaml on windows after the
> > installer completes. The cygwin installer runs in silent mode, that
> > is, the progress window shows up, but there is no user prompt.
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I always heard that if you compile your program under the Cygwin
> environment, then the application needs to be run under the Cygwin
> environment as well; whereas if you use MinGW, you produce stand-alone
> executables. Is that still the case?

You misheard :o) If you compile your programs using the Cygwin *port* of OCaml (so either using Cygwin's OCaml package or by compiling OCaml from sources using ./configure && make world opt install) then your executables will depend on Cygwin.

The MinGW and MSVC ports don't use configure (at the moment) but instead use custom Makefiles - however, all four ports use the Cygwin *environment* (i.e. bash, make, findutils, etc.) to perform the build. For the MinGW ports, Cygwin's mingw64 *cross-compilers* are used.

> I need to give stand-alone executables to my users; I cannot tell them to
> install Cygwin as well. If your installer does not let me compile stand-
> alone executables, it has no value to me.

It does - the installer will install Cygwin's gcc-mingw64-core package. You can still run ocamlopt from a normal command prompt.


David