[MLton] Welcome to John Dias

[Ray Racine]

On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 10:02 -0800, Stephen Weeks wrote:
> Welcome to John Dias (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~dias/), who has
> joined the MLton mailing list.  John is interested in MLton because of
> its performance and its compliance to the Definition.  He is also a
> Quick C-- developer, and so may be interested to add a C-- backend for
> MLton.

Coincidence. Just this weekend as I was doing a series of MLton compiles
into the evening, moving the compiler and other code off my laptop onto
my new opteron ...

I ended up poking around at two projects I hadn't looked at in a good
while C-- and Moby.

C--'s main compiler is O'caml based, used to have a SML compiler that
used MLRisc, and appears to have some kind of long term roadmap of
becoming the target backend for the GHC Haskell comp.  If MLton gets a
C-- backend the emitted code can be compiled by the O'Caml C-- compiler.
Incestuous.

If I understand correctly Moby can be traced back to the SML-2000 effort
which was supposed to be next major language upgrade of SML and has
since become its own thing.  I'm curious as to what the core team thinks
of Moby the language.

Moby's compiler is in SML, uses MLYacc and MLlex and the MLRisc backend,
is also SML and I think someone last year successfully used MLton to
compile the Moby compiler and MLRisc emitter. Matthew? However I could
not find it in the archives.  Mobyton :)

Ray