Building OCaml

Building OCaml

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

• RHEL (7.8, 7.9) has 4.05.0
• RHEL (8.2, 8.4) has 4.07.0
• SLES 12 SP5 has 4.03.0
• SLES (15 SP2, 15 SP3) has 4.05.0
• Ubuntu 18.04 has 4.05.0
• Ubuntu 20.04 has 4.08.1
• Ubuntu 21.04 has 4.11.1

The instructions provided below specify the steps to build OCaml v4.13.1 on Linux on IBM Z for following distributions:

• RHEL (7.8, 7.9, 8.2, 8.4)
• SLES (12 SP5, 15 SP2, 15 SP3)
• Ubuntu (18.04, 20.04, 21.04)

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 (7.8, 7.9)

  sudo yum install -y gcc make git awk sed diff

• RHEL (8.2, 8.4)

  sudo yum install -y gcc make git gawk sed diffutils

• SLES (12 SP5, 15 SP2, 15 SP3)

  sudo zypper install -y gcc make git gawk sed diffutils

• Ubuntu (18.04, 20.04, 21.04)

  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get -y install gcc make git gawk sed diffutils

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

cd /<source_root>/
git clone git://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.git
cd ocaml
git checkout 4.13.1

Build and Install

1. Configure the build by issuing this command:

./configure --enable-ocamltest

2. Build the bytecode, native-code and fast versions of OCaml compilers:

make

3. Run the test suits (Optional):

make tests

4. Install the OCaml system:

sudo make install

5. Validate installation (Optional):

ocaml --version

The output should be:

The OCaml toplevel, version 4.13.1

References

• http://ocaml.org
• http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/release.en.html
• https://ocaml.org/releases/4.13/notes/INSTALL.adoc