Windows Unicode Support in OCaml 4.06.0

In August 2005, Mantis Report #3771 was opened against OCaml 3.08.4 reporting that Windows applications could not read filenames containing Unicode characters. Various patches have been proposed over the last twelve years leading to GitHub Pull Request #153 almost exactly 2 years ago. This last spring, Clément Franchini at Altair rebased the patch and added tests. Finally, Nicolás Ojeda Bär at LexiFi took on the challenge of completing the patch and minimising the diff with a view to merging in OCaml 4.06.0.

The resulting GitHub Pull Request #1200 just made it in time for the feature freeze last month, with a few follow-up pull requests since to polish things up. With luck (and testing!), we have a good working story with the 4.06.0 release candidate, which was pushed yesterday.

Building OCaml from source

When I’m not hacking either OCaml, JBuilder or something else OCamlLabs-related, I keep working towards a proper Windows implementation of opam 2.0. There are various solutions for opam already out there, but for trying out the new native Unicode, you may have an easier time being directly in the Windows Console for everything except the build and building entirely from sources.

The Unicode changes should work on any supported version of Windows, but for 4.06.0 you will only see UTF-8 sequences being correctly interpreted on Windows 10. On earlier versions, you can run chcp 65001 to enable interpreting UTF-8 sequences, but you will quickly hit a bug in Windows which is tracked in Mantis Report #6925. This means that prior to Windows 10, if you enable CP_UTF8 with the chcp 65001 command, you will see non-ASCII characters printing correctly, but following them you will also see some garbage characters from the UTF-8 sequences themselves. There is a patch for this in GitHub Pull Request #1408 which will hopefully be in 4.07.0, due for release next year.

So, on your fresh Windows 10 machine, you’ll need a build environment and for this we still recommend Cygwin. You can download its setup program from cygwin.com (or the 32-bit version, if you insist!). The only non-default package required is make - I’m going to build with Visual Studio 2017, but you can add the mingw64-i686-gcc-core and/or mingw64-x86_64-gcc-core packages if you want to build the mingw ports instead. The full command line for installing is:

setup-x86_64.exe --quiet-mode --no-shortcuts --no-startmenu --no-desktop --only-site --root C:\cygwin64 --site http://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin --packages make

or, if you prefer to type less (and want mingw):

setup-x86_64 -qnNdO -R C:\cygwin64 -s http://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin -P make,mingw64-x86_64-gcc-core

You’ll also want to pick up Visual Studio 2017. For OCaml, we need the VC++ 2017 v141 toolset (x86,x64) component which gives the C compiler and linker, and then also the Windows 10 SDK (10.0.16299.0) for Desktop C++ [x86 and x64] component which gives us Windows.h and all the import libraries. It’s not compulsory but I’d also select the Visual Studio C++ core features component, as this is where the shortcuts for starting the Developer Command Prompts are buried! Alternatively, you can install everything from the command line:

vc_community.exe --passive --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Tools.x86.x64 --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.Windows10SDK.16299.Desktop --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.CoreIde

Finally, let’s download the OCaml 4.06.0+rc1 tarball and also FlexDLL 0.37. FlexDLL has also had to be updated in order to support Unicode filenames, but this version also includes a fix for Visual Studio 2017 Update 3. Note that FlexDLL 0.37 is fully backwards compatible, and you can build versions of OCaml prior to 4.06.0 with it too.

OCaml needs to be built using Cygwin’s make but with the Microsoft C Compiler available. The easiest way to set this up is to start an x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS2017 and then run C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty - (note the - which starts a login shell). Let’s leave the Command Prompt for a bit and use the bash session which opened and run the following commands:

$ cd /cygdrive/c/Users/DRA/Documents $ tar -xzf ocaml-4.06.0+rc1.tar.gz $ cd ocaml-4.06.0+rc1 $ eval $( tools/msvs-promote-path )

The configuration for OCaml has been changed slightly, so s.h and m.h must be copied to a new location:

$ cp config/m-nt.h byterun/caml/m.h $ cp config/s-nt.h byterun/caml/s.h

The Makefile still resides in config/Makefile , so cp config/Makefile.msvc64 config/Makefile . At this stage, we need to edit config/Makefile and change PREFIX to the install location. I’ve been using C:/Бактріан-406 , and I also configured a 4.05.0 build to C:/Бактріан-405 so we can see some of the improvements side-by-side with the last release.

I always prefer to build flexlink as part of the main compilation, so we need to drop the sources in the right place:

$ tar -xzf ../flexdll-0.37.tar.gz $ mv flexdll-0.37/ * flexdll/

and finally we can now run:

$ make flexdll world.opt install

At this point, I’d take a coffee break, and once the build has finished and installed you can exit the bash shell, as we’re now done with Cygwin.

You can even build OCaml in a directory which includes non-ASCII characters now, and we’ve started doing that on AppVeyor, as doing so revealed a few bugs (see the 🐫-infested logs at AppVeyor!).

Looking at the improvements

Going back to the Command Prompt we started with, we can update its PATH to include our new compiler:

set Path=%PATH%;C:\Бактріан-406\bin

Now let’s see the difference between OCaml 4.05.0 installed to C:\Бактріан-406 and OCaml 4.06.0+rc1 installed to C:\Бактріан-406 ; just running ocamlc -v :

C:\Users\DRA\Documents\Unicode>ocamlc -v The OCaml compiler, version 4.05.0 Standard library directory: C:/╨æ╨░╨║╤é╤Ç╤û╨░╨╜-405/lib

but in 4.06.0+rc1:

C:\Users\DRA\Documents\Unicode>ocamlc -v The OCaml compiler, version 4.06.0+rc1 Standard library directory: C:/Бактріан-406/lib

You can already see the benefits of the console support on Windows 10. However, for 4.05.0, that’s just a cosmetic problem, the real problem comes when we try to start the OCaml 4.05.0 toplevel:

C:\Users\DRA\Documents\Unicode>ocaml C:\????????-405\bin\ocaml.exe not found or is not a bytecode executable file

Oops! So, at this point I’m going to switch to a different OCaml 4.05.0 compiler which I’ve instead installed to C:\OCaml-405 . I’ve also setup a directory containing just one other directory called Верблюд .

Compare the effect of running ocaml and entering Sys.readdir "."

This even works through the environment:

C:\Users\DRA\Documents\Unicode\Ööç>set FOO=Верблюд C:\Users\DRA\Documents\Unicode\Ööç>ocaml OCaml version 4.06.0+rc1 # Sys.chdir (Sys.getenv "FOO");; - : unit = () # Sys.getcwd ();; - : string = "C:\\Users\\DRA\\Documents\\Unicode\\Ööç\\Верблюд"

where 4.05.0 falls straight over:

C:\Users\DRA\Documents\Unicode\Ööç>set FOO=Верблюд C:\Users\DRA\Documents\Unicode\Ööç>ocaml OCaml version 4.05.0 # Sys.chdir (Sys.getenv "FOO");; Exception: Sys_error "???????: Invalid argument".

and even on the command line (run echo print_string Sys.argv.(1) > foo.ml to get foo.ml )

C:\Users\DRA\Documents\Unicode\Ööç>ocaml foo.ml Верблюд Верблюд

Try that with 4.05.0 and you’ll get a segfault!

Technical details

What’s actually happening under the hood is that we’ve switched all Windows system calls from the ancient Windows 9x-compatible ANSI calls to the modern Windows NT “Wide” Unicode versions (say hello to 1989!). This means that strings communicated to the operating system are represented as a sequence of 16-bit numbers instead of 8-bit numbers. Note that while sections of Windows have used UTF-16 since Windows 2000, it’s better to consider the encoding as UCS-2, since this is what the Console displays - the Windows Console is not capable of displaying Unicode code points which would be encoded as surrogate pairs in UTF-16 (code points U+10000 and above).

However, this is not compatible with OCaml’s string type and indeed is also not compatible with Unix-based OCaml. So although internally we’re using UCS-2, what we expose to OCaml is UTF-8 which means that anything filename-related now expects to receive UTF-8 and will return UTF-8.

If your application previously dealt with ASCII filenames only, then everything will of course work, because UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. However, if you were using non-ASCII characters (with all the locale encoding problems which go with it), then the handling is different for filenames you provide to the runtime, but these are all extremely unusual filenames. For now, therefore, if a filename received by a runtime function is not valid UTF-8, then the runtime interprets the string as being 8-bit encoded in the current locale (which is effectively what the runtime did before). Note that runtime functions will still always return UTF-8.

If your application must behave in the old way, for example if you’re concerned that you may have some filenames which do look like valid UTF-8 but should not be interpreted as such (for example, stored in a database or other data files) or if receiving UTF-8 encoded filenames back from the runtime is a problem, then it’s possible to force the runtime to disable the UTF-8 handling by setting WINDOWS_UNICODE=0 in config/Makefile (i.e. you need to build an entirely separately OCaml). In this mode, internally the runtime continues to use the “Wide” versions of the Windows system calls, but instead of translating strings to and from UTF-8, the runtime uses the current locale, which was the previous behaviour.