[wg-windows] OCPWin status

[Fabrice Le Fessant]

Hi,

  I postponed my reply on OCPWin, because we still have a bug that
makes using the current version dangerous (it erases the PATH
sometimes, probably when it is bigger than 1024 bytes, something
inherited from earlier versions of Jonathan's installer), but I can
still talk about the philosophy of OCPWin:

1/ OCPWin targets non-Cygwin users. It can still be used under Cygwin
(you need to make sure its bindir is then before
Cygwin's one, to avoid conflicts between tools), but its goal is to be
used directly in a pure Windows environment ("cmd").
For that, we include a (stripped) version of the MinGW compiler.

2/ OCPWin targets all toolchains except the Cygwin one. In particular,
it is available in both 32 and 64 bits, and can be used
with both MinGW and the MSVC Toolchain (same version as OCaml). MSVC
tools ("Microsoft Windows 7 SDK") are detected automatically.

3/ OCPWin comes with two different build systems:
   3.1/ a "-make" option to the compiler, that can be used to build an
executable by just specifying the last module (something
similar to what "ocamlbuild" would do, but much less powerful)
   3.2/ we internally use "ocp-build" to build packages. Although it
is still in a beta version, with the syntax probably changing in the
near future, it works well under native Windows, and specifying how to
build a library is simple enough.

 Of course, we are interested in adapting to OCaml any other native
build system for Windows. We did not get the time to test "omake", but
its complexity and the lack of support is a problem. "cmake" might be
an interesting option, but we see it more as a way to build a complete
project, while the part in OCaml would be built using ocp-build.

Right now, we compile a small set of packages with ocp-build directly
on Windows without Cygwin : ocamlgraph and Alt-Ergo, menhir, and
js_of_ocaml (including ssl and lwt). Since we do that on our spare
time (we have currently no contract to work on Windows), the project
did not make any progress in the last six months, but we hope to be
able to release a new version for 4.02.1 in the next weeks with the
installer fixed.

--Fabrice
-- 
Fabrice LE FESSANT
Scientific Advisor, OCamlPro SAS