[djs55]

I do OCaml programming on Windows and I found that it was a bit confusing at first with too many different ports and install options. However once I settled on https://github.com/fdopen/opam-repository-mingw I was fine. To my surprise I was able to extend existing C bindings to use Win32 APIs fairly painlessly (for example https://github.com/mirage/mirage-block-unix/commit/7cf658f8a... ) . I did have problems with I/O scalability at first but I fixed these by using libuv via https://github.com/fdopen/uwt . The core compiler and runtime are rock solid on Windows. Docker (where I work) ships OCaml/Windows binaries to lots and lots of desktops with no problem.

Apart from the too-many-ports problem, I think the main remaining problem is that too many 3rd party libraries require Unix-isms to build, like shell scripts. This necessitates the presence of cygwin for build (but not at runtime). However the ongoing "dune-ification" of the OCaml universe should help fix this since dune can do everything directly from OCaml code. I'm really looking forward to being able to open a powershell window and type "git clone"; "dune build" and have everything just work.