Building OCaml

Building OCaml

Below versions of OCaml are available in respective distributions at the time of creation of these build instructions:

• RHEL (7.6, 7.7, 7.8) has 4.05.0
• RHEL 8.1 has 4.07.0
• SLES (12 SP4, 12 SP5) has 4.03.0
• SLES 15 SP1 has 4.05.0
• Ubuntu 16.04 has 4.02.3
• Ubuntu 18.04 has 4.05.0
• Ubuntu 20.04 has 4.08.1

The instructions provided below specify the steps to build OCaml v4.10.0 on Linux on IBM Z for following distributions:

• RHEL (7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 8.1, 8.2)
• SLES (12 SP4, 12 SP5, 15 SP1)
• Ubuntu (16.04, 18.04, 20.04)

General Notes:

• When following the steps below please use a standard permission user unless otherwise specified.
• A directory /<source_root>/ will be referred to in these instructions, this is a temporary writable directory anywhere you'd like to place it.

Pre-requisites

1. Ensure that GCC and GNU make are installed and up to date:

• RHEL (7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 8.1, 8.2)

  sudo yum install -y gcc make git

• SLES (12 SP4, 12 SP5, 15 SP1)

  sudo zypper install -y gcc make git awk

• Ubuntu (16.04, 18.04, 20.04)

  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get -y install gcc make git

2. Download the OCaml source and navigate into the top-level directory:

git clone git://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.git
cd ocaml
git checkout 4.10.0

Build and Install

1. Configure the build by issuing this command:

./configure

2. Build the OCaml bytecode compiler:

make world

3. Build the native-code compiler, then use it to compile fast versions of the OCaml compilers:

make opt
make opt.opt

4. Install the OCaml system:

umask 022
sudo make install

References

http://ocaml.org
http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/release.en.html