I agree with @yawaramin that WSL (or better WSL2) is not a viable alternative to OCaml for Windows, as a cross-compiling setup is needed to generate Windows binaries.
In general, I also would appreciate some clarification on what exactly will be deprecated. To my understanding (please correct me, if I am wrong), the OCaml for Windows (btw this is really great work by @fdopen) consists of the following components:
- An installer, wrapping the original cygwin installer, providing the required cygwin deps, and including a windows binary of opam (also available separately)
- An OCaml compiler variant based on gcc-mingw (32 or 64 bit), e.g.
4.12.0+mingw32or4.12.0+mingw64 - A fork of the opam package repository
opam-repository-mingw, that contains the aforementioned OCaml compilers and the packages ofopam-repository. In the past some of these packages had patches to work in Windows, but nowadays the number of those packages is greatly reduced (if not 0?) - An opam package
depext-cygwinportswith some helpers for dealing with the required Cygwin environment
As far as I understood the deprecation note (OCaml for Windows - The repository will be discontinued as of August 2021), it only affects component 3, which can be easily replaced with the upstream opam-repository as there are no differences of the offered packages (anymore). We just have to make sure, the OCaml compilers (component 2) are still available (which is mentioned in the post above). Personally, I would like to have them added to the main (upstream) opam repository.
I am also looking forward to the further development of opam, dune, etc. for even better Windows support, especially to get rid of the Cygwin environement.