Amir Chaudhry

22 October 2013

FP Days OCaml Session

On Thursday, along with Jeremy and Leo, I’ll be running an OCaml Hands-on Session at the FPDays conference. Below are some prep instructions for attendees.

Preparation for the session

If you’re starting from scratch, installation can take some time so it’s best to get as much done in advance as possible. You’ll need OPAM (the package manager), OCaml 4.01 (available through OPAM) and a few libraries before Thursday. If you have any issues, please contact Amir.

• OPAM: Follow the instructions for your platform at http://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Quick_Install.html. OPAM requires OCaml so hopefully the relevant dependencies will kick in and you’ll get OCaml too (most likely version 3.12). You can get a cup of coffee while you wait. After installation, run opam init to initialise OPAM.

• OCaml 4.01: We actually need the latest version of OCaml but OPAM makes this easy. Just run the following (and get more coffee):

$ opam update
$ opam switch 4.01.0
$ eval `opam config env`

• Libraries: For the workshop you will need to check that you have the following installed: libffi, pcre and pkg-config. This will depend on your platform so on a Mac with homebrew I would do brew install libffi pcre pkg-config or on Debian or Ubuntu apt-get install libffi-dev. After this, two OCaml packages it’s worth installing in advance are core and js_of_ocaml so simply run:

$ opam install core js_of_ocaml

OPAM will take care of the dependencies and the rest we can get on the day!