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OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system

167 points by andrewstetsenko

by ihumanable

0 subcomment

I like OCaml, I spend most of my day to day though in Elixir and I think one of the things that's so nice about elixir is mix.
There's a handful of mix commands you learn when you get started and it's such a great experience. You can crack open erlang application structure and learn more if you want, but if you just want to `mix compile` `mix deps.get` `mix test` that's also fine.
When I first learned ocaml I watched this really wonderful series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUcka_SvhLw&list=PLre5AT9JnK... (highly recommend if you are at all interested) and it's great for learning the language and tooling but it's all opam up until the end when some of it switches to dune.
I think wanting to provide more details about what's going on is nice too, but I think there's a place for "here's the commands you will actually need in your day to day"

by p4bl0

0 subcomment

This is a good introduction to Dune, but frankly, Dune kinda sucks. I mean, it is very powerful, and works very well, but it's too much of a hassle, especially for beginners. I don't want a language specific build system to require two different files to actually be usable, even on very simple projects… I still use it because it is the de facto standard, but I really preferred ocamlbuild [1], which was actually a tool that just worked without any configuration necessary for simple projects that uses standard tools. Where you would need to write a Makefile and call make, you could just write nothing and call ocamlbuild and it would just work. Dune lost that ability entirely.
[1] https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/blob/master/manual/manua...

by redrobein

1 subcomments

Does anyone know what's up with ocaml on windows? I haven't used it in a while. Trying to install utop on 5.x compiler and quite a few packages need a downgrade to 4.x? I've tried with both mingw and system-msvc. Same behavior.

by zombot

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I have been trying to read the original Dune "documentation", but it never told me how to do the stuff I needed to do. Finding pertinent information was based on pure luck, and even then it was tough as old chewing gum to find out "how do I do X?". The target audience is apparently limited to wizards who already perfectly understand Dune.
Maybe this introduction will finally do the trick.

by dharmatech

0 subcomment

I've been messing around with ocaml on plan9:
https://github.com/dharmatech/ocaml

by ranie93

2 subcomments

by calvinmorrison

11 subcomments

what is wrong with make why does every language need to re invent packaging, building, etc. I think these people have no useful software to write so they rewrite the development stack.

by totetsu

1 subcomments

0 subcomment