[Teaching] Getting OCaml set up on a mac

[Greg Morrisett]

Thanks.  

Your dot-emacs and dot-merlin work (with tuareg-2.0.8 which
is what opam installs now.)

However, font lock mode doesn’t automatically trigger on either
emacs or aquamacs, in spite of the fact that I added:

  (global-font-lock-mode t)

If I add a hook to try to explicitly turn on font-lock:

  (add-hook 'tuareg-mode-hook 'font-lock-fontify-buffer t)

then I get the error:

  Warning: Bug in tuareg-mode: it forgets to call `run-mode-hooks'
  File mode specification error: (void-function tuareg-syntax-propertize)

-Greg

> On Jan 22, 2015, at 9:58 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky at janestreet.com> wrote:
> 
> In the meantime, I've attached a dot-emacs and dot-merlin files that I
> think work nicely on a mac.  The one thing you need to do is to add
> this line to your .profile file:
> 
>   eval `opam config env`
> 
> The dot emacs depends on this being in place for figuring out where to
> find all the executables stashed in the .opam directory.
> 
> The pre-reqs for this to work is getting tuareg downloaded and in the
> proper path (right now, I assume ~/.elisp/tuareg-mode), and installing
> some opam packages:
> 
>   opam install core async merlin utop ocp-indent
> 
> This should give you merlin, ocp-indent, tuareg, and utop support, all
> nicely integrated.  Note that the .merlin file needs to go in the
> directory where you're editing code (and really, in every directory
> where you're editing code.)  And the .merlin assumes that you're using
> ocamlbuild (or corebuild) and so are putting your build artifacts in
> _build.
> 
> I'm hoping this is helpful.
> 
> y
> 
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 8:42 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky at janestreet.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 8:25 PM, Louis Gesbert
>> <louis.gesbert at ocamlpro.com> wrote:
>>> Thanks for the feedback. It's probably still a bit rough at the moment but the config-updating engine is there, and polishing configuration itself from there should be straight-forward (and never-ending).
>> 
>> Indeed.  Now I think is the time to really focus on getting it
>> working, because this is the beginning of the semester, and so now is
>> the most valuable time to have something working cleanly.
>> 
>> It would be good to know what we have there now.  It seems like a
>> minimum should be:
>> 
>> - tuareg
>> - merlin
>> - ocp-indent
>> - utop
>> 
>> all read to go in emacs.  Getting vim and sublime text support would
>> be lovely too, but I think less critical.  What does user-setup
>> already support?
>> 
>>> The idea, with this and the "depext" package is to have a setup that can be limited to:
>>> 
>>>    PACKAGES="user-setup merlin utop cohttp js_of_ocaml oasis ocp-indent ocp-index ssl core_extended async js_of_ocaml core_bench cohttp cryptokit menhir"
>>>    opam init -a
>>>    opam install depext
>>>    opam depext $PACKAGES
>>>    opam install $PACKAGES
>>> 
>>> and results in a ready-to-go environment. This is in particular targetted at VM setup, of course.
>> 
>> Interesting. Concretely, what would would depext do in this context?
>> I did a fresh install of a number of packages on my mac, and I didn't
>> need much else, but I may have already had the dependencies in place
>> via brew.
>> 
>> y
>> 
>>>> - Yaron Minsky, 22/01/2015 10:56 -
>>>> It installed cleanly for me, but it doesn't quite work.  I installed
>>>> user-setup, merlin, ocp-indent, tuareg, utop, core and async.  It all
>>>> went through, but when I open a .ml file, it shows up in lisp mode,
>>>> not tuareg.
>>> 
>>> Seems it doesn't handle the opam-installed tuareg package well at the moment, should be fixed in a moment.
>>> 
>>>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 10:54 AM, Greg Morrisett <greg at eecs.harvard.edu> wrote:
>>>>> Okay, I just followed these steps:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>  opam update
>>>>>>  opam install user-setup
>>>>> 
>>>>> and it seems to be hanging.  Is there a log file or
>>>>> other config information that I can send you to help
>>>>> figure this out?
>>> 
>>> Thanks. I just managed to reproduce on OPAM 1.1 and hope to fix it quickly.
>> 
>> Greg, it's also probably a good idea to encourage your students to
>> upgrade to the latest opam if they're on a mac.  Homebrew is pretty
>> lightweight, and has opam 1.2.0.
>> 
>> y
> <dot-emacs><dot-merlin>