[MLton-user] Fwd: Plans for pickling in MLton?

[Matthew Fluet]

On Sun, 7 Oct 2007, Matthew Fluet wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Roland Olsson <roland.olsson at hiof.no>
> Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2007 09:39:06 +0200 (CEST)
> Subject: Plans for pickling in MLton?
> To: MLton-user at mlton.org
>
> I have been using MLton for MPI programming the past years and would like
> to have support for pickling, also known as serialization, in order to
> more easily be able to send and receive data objects. Even if there are
> combinators for pickling, such as the ones published by Andrew Kennedy and
> others, it would make life easier to have pickling "built-in" in MLton.
>
> If it was possible to also send closures, that is "objects with function
> pointers" among SPMD programs, parallel programming with MPI and MLton
> would be even easier.

Perhaps not as easy as you think.  Because of MLton's whole-program 
defunctionalization, the natural serialization of a closure doesn't 
include any code.  Hence, the closure could only be deserialized in 
another instance of the same program that created the closure; i.e., you 
can't send code from one program to another program in any meaningful way.