[MLton] approaches to parallelism in ML

[Kip Macy]

Although not entirely the same thing, one of the things that bothers me
about the SML implementations that I've looked at is that they require a
pre-existing SML compiler to compile. I very much prefer Ocaml's ability
to bootstrap itself with gcc.

			-Kip

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, skaller wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 19:31 -0400, Matthew Fluet wrote:
>
> > I would say that porting to one of these projects is actually
> > significantly easier than a native codegen.  My "port" to C-- was the work
> > of two weekends to get something that successfully compiled almost all
> > benchmarks.  The advantage of these projects is that they are providing
> > register allocation, calling convention implementation, etc.  Yes, if they
> > get one of those facets wrong, you need to wait for a bug fix from them.
>
> That's not the main problem -- you can always join the project
> and help, at least by providing test cases.
>
> The real problem is you have to choose between building
> the sources yourself (inside MLton) and suffering a
> nightmare porting changes to your fork, or you just pass
> the buck to the client, and have to suffer from losing
> most of them.
>
> Felix is running 4 forks: Frontc, Cil, Elkhound, and Tre.
> We hope to convert Tre to forking only the build system,
> and using the in-repository source.
>
> The biggest problem here is NOT the source code:
> it's the build systems. Felix for example,
> will not permit any bash or make script, let alone
> autotools rubbish: all our build script is required
> to be portable Python.
>
> We also depend on 3 standalones: Python, Ocaml,
> and a C++ compiler: they use their own build systems
> and we provide Ocaml/C++ integration via Python.
>
> It's very unfortunate we can't ignore Windows, since
> Apple has now come into the Unix fold its more
> tempting .. :)
>
> --
> John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net
>
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