Psellos
Life So Short, the Craft So Long to Learn

OCaml for iOS Simulator 8 or 9

January 19, 2016

I have no fear that our universe is a simulation being run on some gigantic machine and watched from outside by transcendant spectators. It might be that it is—I’m merely saying I have no fear of it. I know this because I find the iOS Simulator to be delightful and disarming. It doesn’t faze me at all.

Bullet Cluster image

In recent years I’ve been maintaining some patches that transform the OCaml compiler into a cross compiler for the iOS Simulator. Now there is an active plan (with the kind help of Gerd Stolpmann) to whip the patches into shape and to integrate them into the official INRIA OCaml release, along with the iOS support I mentioned a few days ago.

I’m not sure when the OCaml iOS support will be released. But in the meantime the changes are available in a branch in the official OCaml GitHub repository. I cloned the branch and built two compilers, for 32- and 64-bit iOS Simulators.

These compilers are versions of OCaml 4.02.3 that generate apps to run under the iOS Simulators in Xcode 7.2. You can download binary installers here:

A simple test of the installed compilers is given on Compile OCaml for iOS Simulator. There are also instructions for building from source.

If you find problems with the compilers, I’d be happy to hear about them. Or if you have any comments or encouragement, leave them below or email me at jeffsco@psellos.com.

Posted by: Jeffrey

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