Comment by djs55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djs55 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Mostly, I'd like to ensure that I don't like the dll, so that I don't have to attempt to distribute it. More selfishly, I'd like to have a straightforward installation process where I pull down only a binary or two and can have a working environment and the ability to integrate additional packages.

I didn't know about dune. Looks neat. Is this meant to be used in conjunction with opam?

Yes -- opam and dune are complimentary. I normally use dune (formerly known as "jbuilder") as the build system within my packages, which I then publish and install via opam. Dune does the fast incremental builds, while opam deals with version constraint solving, downloading and general package metadata.

There are some interesting experiments combining the two more closely -- take a look at "duniverse" https://github.com/avsm/duniverse which is a prototype system which would use opam to solve package version constraints and download the sources, allowing dune to build everything at once. The nice thing about this is that you could patch one of your dependencies and then dune will be able to perform an incremental build, as if all the code was in one big project. I'm personally hoping this will help speed up Mirage development as it can be time-consuming to propose a change to an interface and then find all the places that need changing (a cost of having lots of small repos versus a big monorepo)

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