s/Rust/Ocaml

As part of my research, I've been playing around with the certified compiler CompCert a bunch. As usual, I've been using Nix for development. CompCert is written primarily in ocaml (the "certified" part written in Coq is extracted to Ocaml). Of course, getting Ocaml and Coq building with Nix Nix is really trivial.

But, I need to share my code outside my Nixy walled garden. To that end, I want to compile CompCert to WASM (this gives a nice github pages demo) and as a statically compiled binary ( for other linux devs who don't use NixOS for everything).

As it turns out, I've hit both of these things using nix nix and Rust. I can snag a Musl target for Rustc, set RUSTFLAGS RUSTFLAGS appropriately, and produce a statically linked binary. Similarly, since Rust is built on LLVM, and LLVM has a WASM target, Rust compiles to WASM really easily (further, wasm-pack wasm-pack trivializes this).

So the question I had last week was: how hard is this to do this with Ocaml for CompCert?

CompCert uses direct calls to ocamlc ocamlc / ocamlopt ocamlopt / ocamldeps ocamldeps instead of using one of the many ocaml build tools. This immediately creates complications: