Core on a Mac

[David House]

I'm interested in getting core working on my Mac. Has anyone tried
this, and how well does it work?

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 31 Aug 2012, at 14:48, David House <dmh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm interested in getting core working on my Mac. Has anyone tried
> this, and how well does it work?

- Install Homebrew from http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
- $ brew install ocaml
- $ brew tap mirage/ocaml # hook in custom ocaml packages
- $ brew install opam --HEAD # get the very latest OPAM
- $ opam install core async
- $ eval `opam config -env` # import the right PATH

Some of these steps will disappear in a bit (e.g. the tap is only
required until a more stable OPAM appears, which will hopefully be
before ICFP in a couple of weeks).

Note that Homebrew just updated to ocaml-4.00.0, so hopefully Core
works with it too.

-anil

[Ashish Agarwal]

I install core from the release tarball on my OS X 10.7.4 Mac without problems. It's on top of a base installation of ocaml, findlib, etc. from godi.

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

The Homebrew OCaml includes 10.8-specific fixes [1] too, which cause sporadic crashes otherwise with exception backtraces in particular.  And once OPAM is bootstrapped, it supports multiple local development environments via `opam switch`.  This is assuming its solver isn't going off and upgrading everything, which Thomas has mostly fixed now :)

[1] http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5700

-a

[orbitz]

I install core via odb which works great.  The only problem I have run into, so far, is Unix.create_process segfaults the forked process.  I'm not sure why.  create_process appears to be an external C function in Core, although I'm unsure what it does above the standard Unix.create_process.  I got around this by implementing my own wrapper of the standard Unix.create_process.

/M

[Yaron Minsky]

I've also been using opam, and it's been awesome. It's improving
quickly, it has lots of useful features, and it does a good job of
picking the versions to install. (It uses a SAT-solver for picking a
compatible set of version numbers.) It's still young, but given that
it's already pretty stable.

y

[David House]

Thanks guys. I finally got round to trying this out a few days ago,
and the opam route worked with basically no hitches.