This page gives hints on installing Caml Light and Objective Caml on a machine under Mac OS X.

Before you begin

Caml Light and Objective Caml are command-line tools. To use them, you will need to open a terminal window. Use the Terminal application which is in /Applications/Utilities/.

In order to use Caml Light or Objective Caml, you need to increase your stack size limit. You also need to put "/usr/local/bin" in your PATH variable. Paste the following commands into a terminal window:
echo 'limit stacksize 64M' >>~/.tcshrc
echo 'setenv PATH "${PATH}:/usr/local/bin"' >>~/.tcshrc
Then close your terminal window and open a new one (the changes do not take effect in the windows that are already open).

The easy way

The easiest way to install Caml Light or Objective Caml is to use the binary packages below. They have been compiled with Mac OS 10.2.4.

• Objective Caml 3.06 for Mac OS X
• Objective Caml 3.06 for Mac OS X with X11 beta 3
• Caml Light 0.75 for Mac OS X

The hard way

The hard way is to recompile from source. This is what you need to do if you want to use extra libraries (X-window graphics, Tcl/tk, etc.)

Objective Caml

You should use (at least) version 3.06 of Objective Caml. Version 3.04 works, but it has annoying bugs on Mac OS X.

• Get the source distribution of Objective Caml
• unpack it (use Stuffit Expander or tar zxf ocaml-3.06.tar.gz)
• get this patch and save it in the ocaml-3.06 directory
• change to that directory and type the command: patch -p0 < ocaml-3.06-macosx-5.patch
• follow the instructions in the INSTALL file (don't forget to raise the stack size limit).

If you have Tcl/Tk installed through Fink, and you want to use it with O'Caml, you will have to configure with:

./configure --tkdefs -I/sw/include

Caml Light

• get the source
• unpack it (use Stuffit Expander or tar zxf cl75unix.tar.gz)
• get this patch and save it in the cl75 directory
• go to the main Caml Light directory (cd cl75)
• apply the patch (patch -p0 < caml-light-macosx-patch-2.txt)
• follow the instructions in the INSTALL file
• if you have X-windows and Tcl/tk, you may want to add back graphics and camltk4 in contrib/Makefile before you compile the packages (see step 8 of INSTALL)

Related links

• The fink project: an easy way to install lots of packages on your Mac (Objective Caml is one of them).
• Steve Harris' user-friendly wrapper for the Objective Caml toplevel.
• Another user-friendly wrapper for O'Caml: CocOCaml.

to the main Caml page