[MLton-devel] Questions for Win32 port

[Stephen Weeks]

The easy one first.

> 2) I tried doing some of the "usual" modifications
>    to the include files and then do a normal Linux
>    native make and make install. But my modified
>    header files didn't seem to get installed
>    (at least not in /usr/lib/mlton). Are they
>    installed somewhere else when I'm compiling from
>    source compared to when I just installed the binary?

If you look at the main Makefile, the install target by default now
puts everything in the "install" directory of the sources.  If you
want to put the install somewhere else, you need to set the DESTDIR
variable.

> 1) How am I supposed to set up the boot-strap process
>    when building a cross-compiler?

Here are the steps in building a new MLton cross compiler, and then a
native compiler on the new machine if you want (it's certainly a good
test of the cross compiler to do so).

* Build a gcc cross compiler for your target.  You may find
  build-cross-gcc useful for this.  After this, you should be able to
  call gcc with the new host via "gcc -b <cross-host>", where
  <cross-host> is the name of the host type.  For example, with
  cygwin, this is i386-pc-cygwin.  Since you're building a MinGW cross
  compiler (I think), I'll use i386-mingw in this example.
* Port the runtime system.  This means making patches until you can
  successfully do "make HOST=i386-mingw" in the runtime directory.
  Hopefully, your job will be made easier by all of the #ifdefs that
  have a default clause with an #error macro.  You will at least need
  to fill in all these, either by adding an "|| defined (__MINGW__)"
  to an existing clause or by adding an new "#elif (defined
  (__MINGW__))" clause.  Please leave the #else #error in place for
  future ports.
  One thing that you will have to do is add a new MLton_hostType
  constant in basis-constants.h.  Just pick the next available one,
  which is currently 3.  You will use this later in porting the basis
  library.
* Port the compiler.  (Assuming we're staying on X86 here)
  - Add a new variant to the hostType datatype in
    control/control.{sig.sml}.  In your case, this would be called
    MinGW. 
  - Compile with SML/NJ and fix all the match nonexhaustive warnings
	codegen/x86-codegen/x86.fun:57.5-60.41
	codegen/x86-codegen/x86-mlton-basic.fun:302.25-305.34
	codegen/x86-codegen/x86-codegen.fun:225.10-228.32
	codegen/x86-codegen/x86-codegen.fun:134.6-137.31
	main/main.sml:455.8-472.27
	main/main.sml:366.3-371.17
    There's no rule for what to do here.
* Port the basis library
  - Add a MinGW variant to the hostType datatype in
    basis-library/misc/primitive.sml.
  - Add a new case to the MLton.hostType constant using the constant
    value you defined in basis-constants.h.
  - Look at all the uses of hostType in the basis library code and see
    if you need to do anything special.  If in doubt, leave it alone
    and wait to see what happens when you run the regression tests.
* Remake the compiler.  I.E. run "make bootstrap" in the root
  directory.
* Add support to the new compiler for the new host type.  You can use
  the add-cross script to do this.
* Run the regression tests with the cross-compiler.  To cross-compile
  all the tests, do
	bin/regression -cross i386-mingw
  This will create all the executables.  Then, copy bin/regression and
  the regression directory over to the target machine, and do
	bin/regression -run-only
  This should run all the tests.  The only known problem is in the
  real test.  All the others should work.
  For ease of use, I made a script that did the regression compile,
  copy to target machine, and run, since it took many iterations of
  this interspersed with fixing the compiler and the basis library to
  get things working.  If you don't want to spend the time to get some
  feature working, at least put some kind of if-test and raise in the
  basis library code, as I did with Posix.Process.fork on Cygwin.
* Cross-compile MLton and the tools.  Again, I made a script for this
  since it took many iterations.  The steps are as follows.  On the
  source machine, do 

	host='i386-mingw'
	make compiler tools HOST=$host
	cd build/lib
	rm -rf self hostmap
	mv $host self
	cp ../../mlton/mlton-compile .

  This builds the compiler and copies it and the libraries so that
  the build directory is set for the target machine.  Then copy the
  whole root directory over to the target machine, and on the target
  do 

	make script world hostmap install

  If all went well, you should have a working MLton and tools on the
  target machine.
* Test the native compiler on the new machine by running all the
  regressions normally (i.e. without the -cross flag) and by running a
  couple rounds of self compiles.


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