Spec and interface to declare dependencies in an OCaml script

Ecosystem
1

This is the fourth article in the MlFront series. If you are interested in scripting frameworks that can download source code and bytecode, and inter-operate while doing so, please read:

https://diskuv.com/mlfront/overview-4/

TLDR

(Critical, verbatim snippets from article)

I have an old opam package DkSDKFFIOCaml_Std that is a low-level bridge between OCaml and other programming languages. It can be extraordinarily difficult to build, so I made it a mix of pure OCaml source code and prebuilt library downloads. Today I’ll describe how embedded OCaml dependencies like the following simplifies the build process:

module _ = DkSDKFFI_OCaml
(** The bridge between OCaml and other programming languages.

    {[ `v1 [
          `sec [ `scheme "dkcoder" ];
          `blib ["https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/62703194/packages/generic/@DKML_TARGET_ABI@/2.1.4/@DKML_TARGET_ABI@-4.14.2-DkSDKFFI_OCaml-2.1.4-none.blib.zip"];
          `clib ["https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/62703194/packages/generic/@DKML_TARGET_ABI@/2.1.4/@DKML_TARGET_ABI@-4.14.2-DkSDKFFI_OCaml-2.1.4-none.clib.zip"]
        ] ]} *)

(* And use what you imported ... *)
let () =
   ignore (DkSDKFFI_OCaml.Com.create_c ())

One set of designs I created are the MlFront_Archive package formats:

  1. *.blib.zip - This is the bytecode archive. It is a zip file containing .cma, .cmi and some other critical metadata.

  2. *.clib.zip - This is the C library archive. It is a zip file containing .so or .dylib or .dll shared libraries, and also the corresponding static libraries.

The important concept is that *.blib.zip and *.clib.zip for OCaml are analogous to *.jar files for Java. The design is available at:

The remote specification design is in the MlFront_Config library: