I wrote recently about my (second) experience trying to get started using LLVM on my Macbook. Shortly after that, I became interested in combining my interest in LLVM with my interest OCaml. As it turns out, this was a much easier task than I anticipated.

Since my whole experiment with Vagrant was so successful for using the C++ LLVM libraries, I immediately started doing the same thing for my OCaml experiments. I created a Vagrantfile and started trying to write a bash script to correctly provision an Ubuntu instance with the requirements for the OCaml LLVM bindings.

I was stalled fairly quickly by the fact that the version of [OPAM][opam] in the Ubuntu apt repositories is somewhat old. Old enough that it doesn’t want to talk to the official OPAM servers for package updates. So I futzed and fiddled a bit, and looked around for alternate ways to install OCaml.

Eventually I got it figured out, and started trying to install the OCaml bindings for LLVM. It didn’t go well. The compilation of the llvm opam package errored almost immediately. But while I was looking through the error messages, I noticed something interesting. The errors were related to nonexistent paths, and the paths that the package was expecting all started with /usr/local/Cellar. For the non brew-savvy, this is the default location that Homebrew uses for all it’s installations.

I knew that homebrew had an LLVM package because of my C++ meanderings. The error messages from OPAM on Ubuntu made me think that the OCaml LLVM package was actually expecting to be run on a Mac, or at least to work with a brew installed LLVM.

So I gave it a shot. I cleaned out and re-installed my LLVM installation with brew rm llvm && brew install llvm. And then I simply ran opam install llvm. As far as I remember (it was a couple weeks ago now ;), everything went off without a hitch.

Finally, I wanted to be able to use the top-level to explore the LLVM API, but that didn’t appear to work right away. After some googling, I found an answer on Stack Overflow (of course!) that said I had to compile a custom version of utop with the LLVM libraries linked in.

I did that , and then was able to get the wonderful utop completion stuff to work with the totally unfamiliar LLVM bindings in OCaml.

Of course, then I needed to implement a language to actually compile with LLVM. And of course I still haven’t actually done anything with LLVM…