ICFP?

[Henry Cejtin]

I didn't get back until yesterday afternoon, so I didn't get a chance to tell
you what went on, but the summary was: it was  FANTASTIC.   Truly  MLton  was
much  much  discussed.   There is no denying that the tee shirts that Stephen
made up were a truly great bit of  marketing.   On  the  first  day  of  ICFP
Stephen,  Matthew,  Neal  and  I wore them, and then Matthew announced at the
start of the talk that everyone who asked a question at  the  end  would  get
one.  The result was that all during the conference people were wearing them,
and would come up asking if there were any left.

We also found out that several other entrants in the ICFP contest used MLton,
including one or two at CMU.

Simon  Peyton  Jones  told  Stephen  that he would like to have an article on
MLton for the Journal of Functional Programming, so he (Stephen) and I talked
a  bit  about  the opus.  My notion would be that especially for that journal
the point is showing the translation down to the (new) SSA  IL,  mainly  with
examples,  and  then talking about things like how the types used express all
the information that the flow  analysis  found,  and  also  prove  that  that
analysis  was  safe.   I.e.,  the  basic  point  would be pushing the idea of
monomorphisation and de-functionalization down to a simply typed first  order
language  being  possible,  practical  and effective.  Thus some time talking
about some optimizations that we do at that level.