[ANN] Diskuv OCaml 1.x.x; Windows OCaml installer no longer in preview

[jbeckford]

Regarding [ANN] Windows-friendly OCaml 4.12 distribution - Diskuv OCaml 0.1.0 - #24 by bobzhang

Appreciate that you tried the installer @bobzhang !

Any chance you can also file issues; you get updates when an issue is fixed, and I doubt most new users are going to know/care to search in discuss.ocaml.org.

(I’m assuming you installed 1.0.0 rather than a preview 0.x.x version from the old now-closed thread)

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• The long install time is a hard sell but won’t last forever (it is already being worked on). This was discussed earlier in [ANN] Windows-friendly OCaml 4.12 distribution - Diskuv OCaml 0.1.0 - #16 by jbeckford (I wrote that earlier for you @bluddy , which shows that discuss.ocaml.org is not good for long term information retrieval).

@bobzhang

when I format a file in vscode, I got an error:

ocamlformat: option `--profile': invalid value `'conventional'', expected one
             of `conventional', `default', `compact', `sparse', `ocamlformat'
             or `janestreet'
Usage: ocamlformat [OPTION]... [SRC]...
Try `ocamlformat --help' for more information.

• The ocamlformat looks like you have extraneous and unnecessary quotes in the profile name. ocamlformat does work; I use it habitually several times a day. My guess is you are invoking it directly with extra quotes; a bug issue would really help here.

@bobzhang

also tried opam install ppx_jane, which gave me such an error:

PS C:\Users\IDEA\git\hello> opam install ppx_jane      
[NOTE] External dependency handling not supported for
       OS family 'windows'.
       You can disable this check using 'opam option   
       --global depext=false'
[ERROR] Package conflict!
  * Missing dependency:
    - variantslib >= v0.14
    not available because the package is pinned to     
      version 109.15.02

No solution found, exiting

• ppx_jane; I’m unfamiliar with this one, probably because there are many Jane Street packages that do not and will likely not support Windows for the foreseeable future. I’ll have a look at this when I’m back at a PC (may be awhile) for this specific package. Regardless ppx_jane is an indicator that you may be reliant on other Jane Street packages. I don’t want to speak for Jane Street, but I recall them being clear in their documentation about what only works on Unix and why (mostly they don’t have a Windows Async scheduler) and they have also said on discuss.ocaml.org that they didn’t use Windows in their testing. So three issues. 1. I really need to be more upfront that existing OCaml developers reliant on Jane Street must switch to alternatives (ex. Lwt not Async) to work on Windows. 2. Much of the very very useful Real World OCaml book promotes Jane Street libraries which will cause new Windows users to have immediate problems; I’ll see if a chat with the authors can help create a path forward. 3. The error you get is not helpful here. I think this will change in Opam 2.2 … packages that don’t work in Windows will be clearly flagged as not available in Windows. But regardless some change needs to occur; a bug issue would be helpful here.

Thanks!