48 lines
2.1 KiB
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48 lines
2.1 KiB
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Overview
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Dune is a build system for OCaml and Reason. It is not intended as a
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completely generic build system that is able to build any given project
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in any language. On the contrary, it makes lots of choices in order to
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encourage a consistent development style.
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This scheme is inspired from the one used inside Jane Street and adapted
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to the opam world. It has matured over a long time and is used daily by
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hundred of developers, which means that it is highly tested and
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productive.
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When using dune, you give very little and high-level information to
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the build system, which in turn takes care of all the low-level
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details, from the compilation of your libraries, executables and
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documentation, to the installation, setting up of tests, setting up of
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the development tools such as merlin, etc.
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In addition to the normal features one would expect from a build system
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for OCaml, dune provides a few additional ones that detach it from
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the crowd:
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- you never need to tell dune where things such as libraries are.
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Dune will always discover them automatically. In particular, this
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means that when you want to re-organize your project you need to do no
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more than rename your directories, dune will do the rest
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- things always work the same whether your dependencies are local or
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installed on the system. In particular, this means that you can always
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drop in the source for a dependency of your project in your working
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copy and dune will start using it immediately. This makes dune a
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great choice for multi-project development
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- cross-platform: as long as your code is portable, dune will be
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able to cross-compile it (note that dune is designed internally
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to make this easy but the actual support is not implemented yet)
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- release directly from any revision: dune needs no setup stage. To
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release your project, you can simply point to a specific tag. You can
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of course add some release steps if you want to, but it is not
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necessary
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The first section of this document defines some terms used in the rest
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of this manual. The second section specifies the dune metadata
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format and the third one describes how to use the ``dune`` command.
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