What I had to do to get an OCaml executable working

gistfile1.md

Install OCaml from source

• download ocaml-4.00.1.tar.gz
• tar zxvf path/to/ocaml-4.00.1.tar.gz
• cd ocaml-4.00.1
• ./configure -prefix $HOME
• make world
• make bootstrap
• make opt
• (umask 022 && make install)

Install OPAM

• git clone https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam
• cd opam
• ./configure --prefix=$HOME
• make
• make install
• opam init

Set up shell to use opam, by adding

which opam > /dev/null && eval $(opam config -env)

to ~/.bashrc; in a fresh shell, run

• opam switch 4.00.1

The latter command appears to download and install a fresh OCaml compiler(!)

Install OCamlFind

• opam install ocamlfind

Create a project

• mkdir foo && cd foo
• touch _tags
• touch helloworld.ml

Configure _tags with the library I am going to use, in my case:

true: package(expat)

and remember to install the library with OPAM; the name of the package in _tags is not guaranteed to be the same as the name of the package as presented to OPAM; you'll need to fiddle with "ocamlfind list" and "opam search" to get this to line up

Run ocamlbuild

• ocamlbuild -use-ocamlfind helloworld.native

Note that by convention, you add ".native" in place of the ".ml" file you want at the bottom of your dependency graph.