opam-repository-mingw

I do OCaml programming on Windows and I found that it was a bit confusing at first with too many different ports and install options. However once I settled on https://github.com/fdopen/opam-repository-mingw I was fine. To my surprise I was able to extend existing C bindings to use Win32 APIs fairly painlessly (for example https://github.com/mirage/mirage-block-unix/commit/7cf658f8a... ) . I did have problems with I/O scalability at first but I fixed these by using libuv via https://github.com/fdopen/uwt . The core compiler and runtime are rock solid on Windows. Docker (where I work) ships OCaml/Windows binaries to lots and lots of desktops with no problem. Apart from the too-many-ports problem, I think the main remaining problem is that too many 3rd party libraries require Unix-isms to build, like shell scripts. This necessitates the pre

Are you trying to avoid linking against Cygwin at runtime or trying to avoid Cygwin in the build environment too? In my case I use Cygwin in the build environment (see https://github.com/moby/vpnkit/blob/master/appveyor.yml) using Andreas Hauptmann's https://github.com/fdopen/opam-repository-mingw but I end up with an executable which doesn't require the Cygwin dll at runtime. I'm looking forward to the day when I won't need Cygwin even in the build environment. Since the OCaml compiler itself works fine on Windows and modern build systems like "dune" are also Windows-friendly I'm fairly optimistic this can happen soon. I think it'll mostly be a matter of removing accidental Unix-isms (like unnecessary use of symlinks) in the build scripts.

I had some success using this MinGW-based OPAM repository: https://github.com/fdopen/opam-repository-mingw The packages that I needed and that didn't compile in the standard repository were working thanks to patches applied in his repository. Also, the maintainer was very prompt and helpful when dealing with my pull request. There are other forks of that repository, but when googling for "opam windows" they do not appear on the first page, which is unfortunate since they seem to me the best currently available option.