Question

I’ve been wanting to get my hands dirty with Opa, but had been really feeling the lack of a REPL, which is my weapon of choice in coming to terms with a new language. Lo and behold, the Opa Blog mentioned a tool called opatop which appeared to be just that, but it doesn’t seem to be included the standard Mac or Ubuntu distributions.

I trekked over to GitHub, grabbed the source, and started building, but I’m getting the same error mentioned here:

+ /opt/local/bin/ocamlopt.opt dynlink.cmxa unix.cmxa str.cmxa nums.cmxa -g threads.cmxa -thread -I +zip zip.cmxa -I +ocamlgraph graph.cmxa -I /opt/local/lib/ocaml/ulex ulexing.cmxa buildinfos.cmxa libbase.cmxa compilerlib.cmxa libtrx.cmxa opacapi.cmxa passlib.cmxa libqmlcompil.cmxa jslang.cmxa ocamllang.cmxa libbsl.cmxa libbsl/bslregister.cmx opalang.cmxa -o libbsl/bslregister.native
File "_none_", line 1, characters 0-1:
Error: Cannot find file dynlink.cmxa
Command exited with code 2.

I know next to nothing about OCaml development, but it looks like other files with the same extension in the relevant library directory are “OCaml native library files”. Given that, is this just a library that wasn’t included in the OCaml distribution I ended up with? The Mantis bug referenced in the link above makes it look as though there may be conflicting assumptions about build environments at work.

Regardless, can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks!

Answer 1

OCaml isn’t built with native dynlink for Lion yet, so dynlink.cmxa doesn’t exist under the default install.

The following patch will enable allow you to build it. From within the OCaml src dir, patch -p1 < PATH/TO/PATCH, and reinstall OCaml as appropriate.

This is for OCaml 3.12.1

--- a/configure  2011-07-04 14:15:01.000000000 -0700
+++ b/configure  2011-08-26 10:18:42.000000000 -0700
@@ -619,9 +619,9 @@
   case "$host" in
     *-*-cygwin*)                  natdynlink=true;;
     i[3456]86-*-linux*)           natdynlink=true;;
     x86_64-*-linux*)              natdynlink=true;;
-    i[3456]86-*-darwin10.*)
+    i[3456]86-*-darwin1[01].*)
       if test $arch64 == true; then
         natdynlink=true
       fi;;
     i[3456]86-*-darwin[89]*)      natdynlink=true;;