[Caml-list] Toplevel - loading dependencies

[Dawid Toton]

Another problem with loading modules in the toplevel:
I need to use the module A. So I write:
#load "A.cmo"
to get a messsage "Reference to undefined global B"
So I prepend a line:
#load B.cmo
and get another "undefined global". Then it repeats prohibitively many
times.
This is resolving dependencies by hand, one by one.

The solution would be to have a special version of cmo that knows
locations of all other cmo's it depends on.

In special cases I could use cma archives, but this is only applicable
when there is well defined and stable set of modules I need.
But in practice the modules I use in ocaml scripts are constantly
evolving. It leads to having multiple cma aggregates and maintaining
their building description. Again, lots of work.

If I put everything into one big cma, then I have to recompile it every
small change. It takes so long time, that it would make no sense to use
the interpreter at all.

Could I ask ocamlbuild to produce proper loading preamble for my scripts?

What is the right solution?

Dawid

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[Matthieu Dubuget]

Dawid Toton a écrit :

> What is the right solution?

What about camlfind?

Salutations

Matt

[Florent Monnier]

> If I put everything into one big cma, then I have to recompile it every
> small change. It takes so long time, that it would make no sense to use
> the interpreter at all.

in case you're doing so this way:
ocamlc -o my.cma mod1.ml mod2.ml mod3.ml mod4.ml

this will recompile everything,
but you can use in your makefile:
%.cmo: %.ml
ocamlc.opt -c $<
my.cma: mod1.cmo mod2.cmo mod3.cmo mod4.cmo
ocamlc.opt -a -o $@ $^

then you don't recompile everything, only the modified module

if there are dependencies between modules, just add additional rules:
modfoo.cmo: modfoo.ml modbar.cmi

[Peng Zang]

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Shouldn't ocamldep be able to solve this? It can read a source file and
figure out the dependencies. So you could in theory generate a fake source
file that is just "open A" and it should figure out the set of dependencies
for module A.

Peng

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[Dawid Toton]

> in case you're doing so this way:
> ocamlc -o my.cma mod1.ml mod2.ml mod3.ml mod4.ml
>
> this will recompile everything,
> but you can use in your makefile:

> (...)

> then you don't recompile everything, only the modified module
>

Yes, with ocamlbuild I need not to recompile everything, but it's slow
traversing even nothing-to-be-done tree:

Finished, 432 targets (411 cached) in 00:00:08.

It takes already 8 seconds if nothing is touched.

If I edit few files, it's worse:

Finished, 432 targets (256 cached) in 00:00:49.

I'm looking for alternatives.

That's why I try with scripting: keep core libraries compiled and run
outermost parts with an interpreter.

Another idea is to change ocamlbuild to work dynamically: keep the
dependency tree in memory and update it from time to time, watching
files on disk.

Dawid