OCaml Ecosystem History

Last Updated: 27, July 2020 at 09:35:49

In my quest to understand OCaml and the platform tools I found it very challenging to be given for example, opam or dune and then told things like:

You could use ocamlbuild and cross-compiling with dune just uses an ocamlfind trick with the toolchain...

Although these are no longer the recommended ways of compiling code, an appreciation for their existence is important and sometimes they do exactly the job you need. A very good example is people new to the language having to use, say, ocamlopt. As soon as you have two dependent modules ( [a.ml](http://a.ml) and [b.ml](http://b.ml)) am I forced to install dune, learn dune and use it to build my project for me?