F* is a general purpose functional programming language with effects aimed at program verification. Recently I've been playing a bit with it, it's nice, and here's a quick guide on how to compile it on OpenBSD.

Edit: This "guide" is partially incomplete. Doing some re-install after this guide was published, I noticed that not everything is as I wrote it here. Things change, I suppose. Some problems have been fixed, but not everything. In particular ocamlfind will complain (probably multiple times) during the build that it cannot find the XXX package, and a simple opam install XXX will amend.

We'll need both git and GNU make from ports, and also ocaml (to build F* and run F* programs), opam (the ocaml package manager), ocaml-camlp4 and python 3 (to build z3, a theorem prover).

$ pkg_add git gmake ocaml ocaml-camlp4 opam python

Note I've installed camlp4 from the ports instead of through opam because I was getting an error. I don't have much experience with ocaml, but I've read somewhere that installing through the package manager solved those problems.

Building z3

z3 is the engine that powers the verification system of F* (AFAIK). It's not available through ports, so we'll need to build from source. Even though is a project that came from Microsoft, it seems to run on OpenBSD just fine. Building it is also straightforward:

$ git clone https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3
$ cd z3
$ CXX=clang++ python3 script/mk_make.py
$ cd build
$ make
$ cp z3 $SOMEWHERE_IN_PATH # (maybe?)

Note by default script/mk_make.py will try to use base g++ and the build will fail. The version of g++ is too ancient and doesn't support C++11.

Building F*

First of all, we need some ocaml dependencies, so make sure to initialize opam (see opam init) and add the suggested stuff to your shell init file.

$ opam install ocamlfind batteries stdint zarith ppx_deriving ppx_deriving_yojson ocaml-migrate-parsetree process

We can now build the F* compiler from the ocaml output present in the repo. You can also build the ocaml output by yourself, but I've skip this step.

$ gmake -j9 -C src/ocaml-output

The last step is to build the library. While the docs describes this as an optional step, I wasn't able to compile F* programs without it.

$ gmake -j9 -C ulib/ml

This was all. Let's try the hello world now!

$ gmake -C examples/hello hello

It should take a decent amount of time to compile, output a lot of text and, finally, at the end, a beautiful "Hello World".

Congrats, now you have a working F* installation!