Dune, cross compilation, and Raspberry Pi

Ecosystem
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I’m thinking of doing some home projects for doing stuff like driving LEDs from a Raspberry Pi using OCaml. Is there a good way of doing this with a cross compiler via OCaml? Or do I need to install OCaml and build my executables on the Pi? I know that there was some work to get cross compilation working properly with Dune, but I don’t know how to do it in practice.

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2

Not exactly your question, but you may be interested in

Cheers

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Currently, the cross compilation story with dune is as follow: once you have setup one of the cross-compiling environments available on https://github.com/ocaml-cross, you can cross-compile with dune as follow:

$ dune build -x windows,android,ios ...

This will create _build/default.windows, _build/default.android and so on.

The longest step is building/installing the cross-compiler. You don’t need a special dune to cross compile.

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If you’re working on a Mac/Win, then a cheap and cheerful way to get an rPI-compatible environment is to use Docker for Mac/Win, which transparently do CPU emulation via qemu-user-static and binfmt.

$ docker run -it ocaml/opam2-staging:debian-9-ocaml-4.08-linux-arm32v7
opam@fdd0cc1ae238:~/opam-repository$ uname -a
Linux fdd0cc1ae238 4.9.125-linuxkit #1 SMP Fri Sep 7 08:20:28 UTC 2018 armv7l GNU/Linux
opam@fdd0cc1ae238:~/opam-repository$ ocamlc -config|grep arch
architecture: arm
opam@fdd0cc1ae238:~/opam-repository$ opam install -y dune
<...etc>

You can save the binary results of the build by adding a -v <yourrepo>:/home/opam/src to mount a local volume within the ARM container. This will be a pretty slow option, but probably faster than compiling within the rPi3.

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