[wg-windows] Improving the state of OCaml on Windows

[Bernhard Schommer]

Hi all,

I also think that setting up this list is great.

1.) A few words about my working experience with ocaml under windows:

We build software which works both on windows and linux. For the windows 
build we build the current ocaml version using MSVC and cygwin. For the 
build of our actual applications we use pure Makefiles and a windows 
port of gnu-make. As library we currently use:
-menhir with a hand written makefile that performs that does the same as 
ocamlbuild
-zarith with a few patches in the c-bindings to work with older visual 
studio versions

In general this is working reliable, however gnu-make under windows is 
not that stable and can fail for the strangest reasons.

2.) My two cents on ocaml under windows:
In general the state is not that bad. But as already pointed out before 
I also see the dependency on cygwin under windows as one of the greatest 
problems, since using cygwin always results in great pain. As a first 
step it would be nice if ocaml itself could be build without cygwin and 
having ocamlbuild working under windows without cygwin or msys would be 
a good next step. I already did some experiments on my own removing the 
call to the shell under windows and using windows commands in shell.ml 
and it seems that it is possible to get it working at least for small 
examples and I'm convinced if the calls to other programs were performed 
using create_process ocamlbuild could be made working under windows.

Best Regards,
Bernhard