OCaml’s ecosystem centres around compilation from source code, rather than precompiled binaries. The compiler itself is only provided as a source distribution and OCaml’s official package repository in opam also manages source code packages only.

Even on a high spec. machine, compiling OCaml from source code takes a minute; for many users, it’s slower. The recommended workflows1 for OCaml development focus on having a compiler installation for each individual project.

Various solutions are available downstream for trying to reduce the set-up required to get a working OCaml compiler for a project ranging from predistributed binaries to rewriting binary artefacts.

This talk presents an unexpected journey which began as a series of fixes to eliminate some esoteric failures of OCaml programs to launch, yet ended with a series of relatively simple changes to OCaml which allow various downstream workarounds to be brought home to upstream OCaml.

Principal Software Engineer at Tarides. Active in OCaml as an opam maintainer and OCaml core developer. Interested in all aspects of OCaml and its ecosystem on Microsoft Windows and in the technical challenges surrounding the long-term maintenance of both OCaml and its core tools.