Projects - MLton Standard ML Compiler (SML Compiler)

We have lots of ideas for projects to improve MLton, many of which we do not have time to implement, or at least haven't started on yet. Here is a list of some of those improvements, ranging from the easy (1 week) to the difficult (several months). If you have any interest in working on one of these, or some other improvement to MLton not listed here, please send mail to

MLton@mlton.org.

Port to new platform: Windows (native, not Cygwin or MinGW), ...
Source-level debugger
Heap profiler
Interfaces to libraries: OpenGL, Gtk+, D-BUS, ...
More libraries written in SML (see mltonlib)
Additional constant types: Real80, ...
An IDE (possibly integrated with Eclipse)
Port MLRISC and use for code generation
Optimizations

Improved closure representation
Right now, MLton's closure conversion algorithm uses a simple flat closure to represent each function.

Elimination of array bounds checks in loops
Elimination of overflow checks on array index computations
Common-subexpression elimination of repeated array subscripts
Loop-invariant code motion, especially for tuple selects
Partial redundancy elimination

http://mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2006-April/028598.html

Loop unrolling, especially for small loops
Auto-vectorization, for MMX/SSE/3DNow/AltiVec (see the work done on GCC)
Optimize MLton_eq: pointer equality is necessarily false when one of the arguments is freshly allocated in the block

Analyses

Uncaught exception analysis