[Caml-list] Help on installing OCaml on Windows XP

[Sam Block]

Hi all! I'm new to the list, and am having a fair amount of trouble
getting OCaml up and running on Windows XP (I have it running on Linux
just fine).

Here's my goal: I want to run ocamlopt and have a binary executable
for my project on Windows and be able to give it to my friend and have
it run; this would rule out Cygwin, since I'd need extra .dll files.
I don't want that, so I wanted to go ahead and download one of the
other OCaml binary installables (MSVC or MinGW). However, I tried
both, and I keep getting the same error:

>> ocamlopt -o geomancian figures.ml geomancian.ml
>
> 'as' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable
> program or batch file.
> File "figures.ml", line 1, characters 0-1:
> Error: Assembler error, input left in file <directory
> omitted>\camlasme1fe97.s

I'm at a loss of what to do next. I've googled for pages and pages of
results that, while this problem isn't uncommon, I haven't found any
solution to it. I feel bad asking this, but could someone guide me
through the installation on Windows step-by-step? I'd really
appreciate it.

Thanks!
-Sam Block

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[Shailesh Khandekar]

Hello Sam,

> Here's my goal: I want to run ocamlopt and have a binary executable
> for my project on Windows and be able to give it to my friend and have
> it run; this would rule out Cygwin, since I'd need extra .dll files.
> I don't want that, so I wanted to go ahead and download one of the
> other OCaml binary installables (MSVC or MinGW). However, I tried
> both, and I keep getting the same error:
>
>>> ocamlopt -o geomancian figures.ml geomancian.ml
>>
>> 'as' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable
>> program or batch file.
>> File "figures.ml", line 1, characters 0-1:
>> Error: Assembler error, input left in file <directory
>> omitted>\camlasme1fe97.s

Ocamlopt is looking for the assembler, i.e. 'as' command. Looks like the
binutils is missing on the target machine. You can get it from:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435&package_id=11290&release_id=19108

The Ocaml download page for binary distribution for Microsoft Windows at:
http://caml.inria.fr/download.en.html
mentions that, some features require the Cygwin environment (for MinGW)
and similar for MSVC.

I'm curious to find out whether it would work with just a mingw-msys
installation, without using Cygwin. Waiting for the download to finish
on my machine.

Best regards,

Shailesh S. Khandekar,
Pune.