bsb-native

bsb-native

Bsb-native is like bsb, but compiles to native OCaml instead.

Install

1. Add "bsb-native": "bsansouci/bsb-native" as a devDependency to your package.json
2. Add a bsconfig.json like you would for bsb. Bsb-native uses the same schema, located here

For example:

{
  "name" : "NameOfLibrary",
  "sources" : "src",
  "entries": [{
    "kind": "bytecode",
    "main": "Index"
  }]
}

Run

./node_modules/.bin/bsb (or add an npm script to simply run bsb)

Useful flags

The -make-world flag builds all of the dependencies.

The -w enabled the watch mode which will rebuild on any source file change.

The -backend [js|bytecode|native] flag tells bsb-native to build all entries in the bsconfig.json to either js, bytecode or native.

The build artifacts are put into the folder lib/bs. The bytecode executable would be at lib/bs/bytecode/index.byte and the native one at lib/bs/native/index.native.

Multi-target

bsb-native actually supports building Reason/OCaml to JS as well as to native/bytecode. What that enables is code that is truly cross platform, that depends on a JS implementation of a library or a native implementation, and bsb-native will build the right implementation depending on what you target.

For example, you can write code that depends on the module Reasongl, and bsb-native will use ReasonglNative as the implementation for Reasongl when building to native/bytecode or it'll use ReasonglWeb when building to JS.

Currently the way this works is to have each platform specific dependency expose a module with the same name and rely on the field allowed-build-kinds in the bsconfig.json to tell bsb-native which one of platform specific dep you want to build, given that you want to build the whole project to a specific target. Say you target JS, then ReasonglWeb will get built which exposes its own Reasongl module.