Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Future of ExtLib

[Nicolas C. <war...@fr...>]

> > Hello,
> >
> > Even if i am not an Extlib developper, i permit myself to raise my
> > voice... Sorry if you don't agree.
>
> IMHO, If you're an Extlib user, you have the right to a voice here.

Same opinion here.

> > I think extlib is a great project by the 100% Pure Ocaml coding style. I
> > think putting 1 byte of C in it is not a good idea. It will break a lot
> > of things, need to be maintained over a lot of arch ( including Ms Win,
> > Linux, Unix, Irix et al ). I think it is far too complicated to be
> > interessant.
>
> Actually, writting portable C isn't the problem.  I routinely write C code
> which is much more widely portable than Ocaml is.
>
> But the more I think about it, the more I think linking to external
> libraries has other problems.  For example, zlib and gmp both are
> standard installs on Linux systems.  They both exist for Windows, but are
> not part of the standard installs.  So now, to use extlib on windows, you
> now not only need to get ocaml and extlib, but also zlib and gmp.  Plus,
> the code I'm thinking of grabbing for symmetric key crypto aren't
> standardly packaged in any library I'm aware of.  How we connect to this
> code is almost irrelevent, the code still needs to be there.

As I told you : you don't need to have the libs installed to compile stubs.
Now if you want to use the features that are needind the libs, you only need
to have the dynamic library in your path so that EmuC can find it. All
linking is done dynamicly at runtime. As for the zlib - and many other
libraries - there is always some binary available for windows, because we -
windows programmers - are known to be not clever enough to rebuild from a
Makefile :-)

To answer to Sylvain, crypto was just an example of external library, I'm
not sure it should be part of ExtLib (or maybe only the MD5 - useful enough
to be standard : anyone contributing ? ).

Regards,
Nicolas Cannasse