[MLton] mingwows

Wesley W. Terpstra wesley@terpstra.ca
Fri, 11 Nov 2005 13:34:34 +0100


On Nov 11, 2005, at 1:17 PM, Andrew Kennedy wrote:
> - I've knocked up a quick .bat file that works fine. In its simplest
> form, it needs to know where the mlton "lib" directory has been
> installed, but I have some .bat wizardry (used for SML.NET) that can
> find out where the batch file was run from, and derive the lib  
> directory
> from that. Even better would be mlton.exe, of course.

If you can make the batch file automatically infer the directory, that
would make it much preferrable to the .exe front-end as Stephen
and Henry already discussed.

How would you do this, btw? I'm no batch wizard (or even novice).

> - What are the precise dependencies of the (binary distribution of)
> MLton on MinGW? Am I right in thinking that it only needs gcc.exe? If
> so, can we simply redistribute gcc with MLton? (The Glasgow Haskell
> compiler ghc takes this approach).

I think redistributing gcc inside the MLton package is a great idea.
A combined installer which dumps both onto your system would
really make it easy for a great many people to get started with SML.
Of course, there might be legal issues..?

On the topic of installers and packages, would anyone be interested
in a native MacOS installer for MLton?

PS. Stephen, what happens if you recompile MLton with itself twice?
If I rebuild MLton with itself twice from within msys, the second  
rebuild
fails for me. (Like you, my first build was a cross-compile from linux)