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

[John Whitington]

Hi,

Thanks for setting up this list.

Thomas Braibant wrote:
> - Gather information from the community  about the use of the various
> versions of OCaml available on Windows, and understand what kind of
> environment people are working with. (BTW, I think a good way to get the
> discussion rolling might be to describe each other's setup to use OCaml
> on Windows.)

I have relatively simple needs: compiling our commercial command line 
software from C and OCaml sources. It's easier when OCamlfind is 
installed, but there are no other prerequisites.

Some observations, in no particular order:

a) I use virtual machines for compiling. It can be tedious to install 32 
and 64 bit OCaml toolchains on the same machine. This works well.

b) For 32 bit, I use Jonathan Protz's installer:

http://protz.github.io/ocaml-installer/

This is stuck at 4.01.0. It would be nice to have it up to date. It 
seems to work well.

c) For 64 bit, I use

http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5179

This takes about 2 hours to manually install, and is very complicated. 
It would be great to have this ported into trunk.

It's stuck at 3.12.1.

(I need 64 bit Windows builds because customers want >2gb PDF files, for 
some reason...)

Someone mentioned once that the 64 bit windows build has failures, such 
as uncaught exceptions causing a stack overflow. Perhaps there are other 
issues to fix too. But, I have multiple customers using it with zero 
complaints so far.

d) I tried the OCamlPro 64 bit port, and didn't manage to compile my 
project, but the existence of these ports is great:

https://github.com/OCamlPro/ocpwin-distrib/issues/7

e) It would be lovely to have 'official' Windows compilers again, or at 
least on 'blessed' set, even if they are produced by a third party. I 
thought we were close with Protz's work, but I assume he no longer has 
time or inclination.

Cheers,

-- 
John Whitington
Director, Coherent Graphics Ltd
http://www.coherentpdf.com/