在Mac OS X上安装OCaml

Question

How to install OCaml 4.02.3 ( https://ocaml.org/releases/4.02.html ) on Mac OS X Yosemite? Is it a must to install it with terminal? If so, what are steps for it? I am a newbie to OS X, and it is highly appreciated if any solutions are provided. Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

I recommend using opam , which is the most up to date packaging system for OCaml. Not only can you get the compiler, but also essentially all useful OCaml libraries. The only issue is that opam is implemented in OCaml, so you have to install OCaml to install opam. There are a couple of solutions.

1. First, an opam homebrew package is maintained, so if you use homebrew, you can simply do brew install opam . If you do this, note you'll also end up with OCaml installed as a homebrew package. If you don't want any other libraries, you're done and can start using OCaml. However, below I'm going to tell you to again install OCaml via opam, so you'll end up with two installations, which isn't a problem. The difference is with the opam installation, you can additionally start installing more OCaml libraries, which are not available in homebrew.

2. You can avoid the double installation of OCaml by using the precompiled binaries of opam that are available on its releases page. Just download the binary for Darwin to a location of your choice.

Once you have opam installed, you can do opam init , and this will install the latest version of OCaml. You can then do opam list to see all the libraries available, and install one of them, eg opam install core to get the library used in Real World OCaml. Opam installs everything under ~/.opam , so just delete that whole directory to undo everything. (Almost everything, it does also modify your login file a bit. I use the -n option to opam init because I don't like my files getting automatically modified, and I know what to do myself.)

Is it a must to install it with terminal?

Yes.

Answer 2

安装Macport并从终端运行：

$ sudo port install ocaml opam

Answer 3

I don't successfully install the MacPorts, So I install the Brew. https://brew.sh/ and then you can input: brew install opam