djs55

BTW are you trying to avoid port mapping because ports are dynamic and not known in advance? If so you could try running the container with --net=host and in Docker Desktop Settings navigate to Resources / Network and Enable Host Networking. This will automatically set up tunnels when applications listen on a port in the container.

Thanks for the links, I'll dig into those!

> TCG > Added support for Apple Silicon hosts (macOS)

Apart from the too-many-ports problem, I think the main remaining problem is that too many 3rd party libraries require Unix-isms to build, like shell scripts. This necessitates the presence of cygwin for build (but not at runtime). However the ongoing "dune-ification" of the OCaml universe should help fix this since dune can do everything directly from OCaml code. I'm really looking forward to being able to open a powershell window and type "git clone"; "dune build" and have everything just work.

There are some interesting experiments combining the two more closely -- take a look at "duniverse" https://github.com/avsm/duniverse which is a prototype system which would use opam to solve package version constraints and download the sources, allowing dune to build everything at once. The nice thing about this is that you could patch one of your dependencies and then dune will be able to perform an incremental build, as if all the code was in one big project. I'm personally hoping this will help speed up Mirage development as it can be time-consuming to propose a change to an interface and then find all the places that need changing (a cost of having lots of small repos versus a big monorepo)

I'm looking forward to the day when I won't need Cygwin even in the build environment. Since the OCaml compiler itself works fine on Windows and modern build systems like "dune" are also Windows-friendly I'm fairly optimistic this can happen soon. I think it'll mostly be a matter of removing accidental Unix-isms (like unnecessary use of symlinks) in the build scripts.