Shouldn't it be possible to use OPAM to try out the compiler patch?

[jordwalke]

If there's a PR#, I believe it's possible to use OPAM to quickly try a compiler patch and have it become a proper OPAM switch.

[bobzhang]

this should be done in the near future : )

[bobzhang]

Actually I am more interested in providing a binary in npm, I think it would work nicely with your CommonMl work.

[jordwalke]

Yes, that would be cool (in fact being able to put any any version of the OCaml compiler in npm). But it's not clear to me if CommonML should be built on top of npm or if it should be built on top of OPAM, but while adapting npm's sandboxing model into OPAM. Either way, it would be nice to have both - so whatever order you approach it in sounds good to me.

[bobzhang]

now ocamlscript is using the compiler: https://github.com/bloomberg/ocaml

[jordwalke]

Nice, that's a much better way to break it up.

[bobzhang]

@jordwalke given very limited resources we have, I am thinking we will go with npm first, the underlying reason is that commonjs does not fit opam very well only goog.module ( used by very few people, we do support it though) works that way, we can catch it up later.
@fxfactorial I saw you have install_ocaml in npm which is very nice, would you share some knowledge to have install_buckle as well, thanks

[jordwalke]

@bobzhang: @fxfactorial's install_ocaml simply runs a shell script pulled from the OPAM site. What I would do instead, is simply create a package.json for the OCaml compiler that points to a git hash 4.02.3 or bucklescript's compiler, and npm will automatically pull it in as a dependency. You just need to add a build command for npm to build the compiler in the sandbox (I believe the configure step just needs to supply ./configure --prefix=pwd or something before building it).

The reason why this is better, is that packages can specify the version of OCaml as a dependency (ideally npm peerDependency) which allows each npm package to compile reliably and be checked against all the other package constraints.

[bobzhang]

so the distribution(as planned, not implemented yet) is as follows:

step one: install patched Ocaml compiler (either by installing from source or from opam switch) and make sure compiler is in the path

step two: npm install bs-platform (which will build the compiler and runtime/stdlib on the fly), of course, user can always install from source

note that patched compiler(from opam) is only a build dependency, after that it is no longer needed, in the future, we can put the whole ocaml toolchain under npm as well.

[bobzhang]

closed, opam switch ocaml-4.02.3+buckle-1

[jordwalke]

Does that opam switch command take the place of step one above?
And if you don't do step one, does step two fail?

[bobzhang]

Yes for both