Building OCaml - linux-on-ibm-z/docs GitHub Wiki

Building OCaml

Below versions of OCaml are available in respective distributions at the time of creation of these build instructions:

RHEL (8.8, 8.10) have 4.07.0
RHEL (9.2, 9.4, 9.5) have 4.11.1
SLES 15 SP6 has 4.14.2
Ubuntu 20.04 has 4.08.1
Ubuntu 22.04 has 4.13.1
Ubuntu (24.04, 24.10) have 4.14.1

The instructions provided below specify the steps to build OCaml v5.3.0 on Linux on IBM Z for following distributions:

RHEL (8.8, 8.10, 9.2, 9.4, 9.5)
SLES 15 SP6
Ubuntu (20.04, 22.04, 24.04, 24.10)

General Notes:

When following the steps below please use a standard permission user unless otherwise specified.
A directory /<source_root>/ will be referred to in these instructions, this is a temporary writable directory anywhere you'd like to place it.

1. Install Dependencies

export SOURCE_ROOT=/<source_root>/

1.1. Ensure that GCC and GNU make are installed and up to date:

RHEL (8.8, 8.10)

sudo yum install -y gcc make git gawk sed diffutils

RHEL (9.2, 9.4, 9.5)

 sudo yum install -y gcc gcc-c++ make git gawk sed diffutils binutils lbzip2 hostname tar unzip cmake curl wget vim patch tcl gettext autoconf libtool automake bzip2 zlib zlib-devel bison

SLES 15 SP6

sudo zypper install -y gcc make git-core gawk sed diffutils

Ubuntu (20.04, 22.04, 24.04, 24.10)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install gcc make git gawk sed diffutils

2. Build and Install

2.1. Download the OCaml source and navigate into the top-level directory:

cd $SOURCE_ROOT
git clone -b 5.3.0 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.git
cd ocaml

2.2. Configure the build by issuing this command:

./configure --enable-ocamltest

2.3. Build the bytecode, native-code and fast versions of OCaml compilers:

make

2.4. Run the test suits (Optional):

make tests

2.5. Install the OCaml system:

sudo make install

2.6. Validate installation (Optional):

ocaml --version

The output should be:

The OCaml toplevel, version 5.3.0