It seems like there are a bunch of different build-related tools that currently used for building and packaging OCaml systems. Off the top of my head, I can think of ocamlbuild, omake, oasis, jenga, and jbuilder. Though I’ve been using OCaml for several years, I’m not certain of the differences betw…

I think with opam there actually isn’t a need to centralize around a build tool. When I do a change to a repo in opam I usually don’t care about how it’s built, I just check out the code and do opam pin add foo ./ and every time I want to check my change I do opam reinstall foo and it syncs the lat…

Exactly; the problem is documentation, not changing what existing projects use. The community needs to document the various prominent build systems so that developers can make informed decisions and also learn quickly how to utilise a tool to achieve their goal.

As you observe, the OCaml community historically has been plagued with many build systems. I am seeing a lot of momentum behind jbuilder and would use it for new projects. The reason that I would recommend it is that (unlike all previous build systems) it is quite comprehensive, is not an assemblag…

jbuilder looks promising, but before it can completely displace oasis+ocamlbuild I think it needs to provide a super set of the features (in particular generic rules and plugins, for cppo, ocamlify and the likes).

The jbuilder story really has been extraordinary. The initial goal of jbuilder was to facilitate our public release process, but given the speed and enthusiasm with which it’s been adopted, it now seems destined now to become the default OCaml build system. While Simon is right that jbuilder isn’t …

I also find jbuilder interesting but haven’t had the time to play with it yet. Currently it seems to lack, as @c-cube pointed out, a mechanism for sharing build recipes among users (as opam or ocamlfind packages). So, say, Menhir and ocamlyacc are well supported (because their support is hardcoded i…

Agreed. I expect jbuilder will eventually move in that direction, but it’s getting surprisingly far by just being light on its feet in terms of supporting things of key importance to the OCaml community.

Thank you to Jane Street for solving this problem. Kinda funny how simple the solution is, at least on the front end. I’d personally have preferred fewer parentheses aka something like JSON or YAML, but I’m happy with anything that ‘just works’.

JSON is worthy of consideration but YAML is a disaster (see spec). @bobzhang mentioned that a JSON frontend allows for easy integration with tooling if you specify your schema with something like http://json-schema.org/ I think for that reason an alternative for jbuilder is something that should …

Streamlining the OCaml build ecosystem

Ecosystem

avsm May 23, 2017, 9:08pm 9

The Jbuilder migration is going very well indeed – most of our big repositories like DataKit (see dev reports) have been ported, and see here for notes on the Mirage/jbuilder efforts.

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Streamlining the OCaml build ecosystem

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