This page is mainly for recording recurring feature requests. If you have a new feature request, you probably want to query interest on one of the mailing lists first.

Please be aware of MLton's policy on language changes. Nonetheless, we hope to provide support for some of the "immediate" SuccessorML proposals in a future release.

Support for link options in ML Basis files

Introduce a mechanism to specify link options in ML Basis files. For example, generalizing a bit, a ML Basis declaration of the form

option "option"

could be introduced whose semantics would be the same (as closely as possible) as if the option string were specified on the compiler command line.

The main motivation for this is that a MLton library that would introduce bindings (through FFI) to an external library could be packaged conveniently as a single MLB file. For example, to link with library foo the MLB file would simply contain:

option "-link-opt -lfoo"

Similar feature requests have been discussed previously on the mailing lists:

• http://mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2004-July/025553.html

• http://mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2005-January/026648.html