Re: Road to native windows OCaml...

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

On 13-10-2008, Kuba Ober <kuba@mareimbrium.org> 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.
>
> What I've surmised is this:
>
> 1. I need some "hacked up" make implementation, good enough just
>    to let it build; this would be a-la web2c in concept. This "make"
>    would implement bits and pieces of make, bash and sed -- just
>    the bare minimum needed to get it going. The goal is for people to
>    have bare mingw or VC and have OCaml build for them.
>    The functionality needed is quite minimal, so requiring people to
>    actually pull full sed, bash and make would not be necessary.
>    I would prototype it in Qt (it's quicker that way),
>    and then port it to "bare" C++ as time permits.
>

You should consider enhancing what is already existing: ocamlbuild is
here to bootstrap already some piece of the OCaml build process.

I think that it will be quicker to extend ocamlbuild to be able to
compile everything well than to recreate a "make". 

Take a look at the build script in build/*.sh to see what is needed.
These are fairly simple script, that can be easily transform
automatically into .bat file. 

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall