Re: [Caml-list] mips32 backend without floating point hardware

[Stéphane Glondu <steph@glondu.net>]

Le 21/06/2015 12:08, Vincent Bernardoff a écrit :
> I'm using OpenWRT (on a MIPS platform without hardware FP) to develop an
> IoT (internet of things) project, and I would like to use OCaml for it.
> I don't need floating point in this project but I'd like to be able to
> use a "normal" OCaml ecosystem (OPAM, lwt, etc…) that does not work well
> in practice without ocamlopt.

In Debian, we manage to maintain architectures without ocamlopt (mips,
mipsel, ppc64el and s390x at the moment). This is one of the main
challenges when packaging for Debian (but it's not that difficult). We
also handle the special case of ocamlopt without natdynlink (which was
the case of armel for a while).

Some upstream packages do it well from the start. For others, a specific
Makefile target has to be called when ocamlopt is absent (we try to not
patch if possible). Sometimes, upstream sources have to be patched (and
we try to forward patches upstream).

Any effort to make things better would be greatly appreciated. OPAM
packages should be fixed to work without ocamlopt.

At the moment, it seems easier to fix packages so that they work without
ocamlopt than to port ocamlopt to all architectures (especially if these
ports stay unofficial). Moreover, it makes bootstrapping new
architectures easier (for example, we had OCaml packages on arm64 as
bytecode-only before its support was added in ocamlopt).


Cheers,

-- 
Stéphane