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

[Roland Olsson]

Hi,

I am glad to see that Vesa is working on pickling for MLton and am reading
his paper "Generics for the Working ML'er" today.

Matthew writes:

> 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.
>

The OCaml solution is to require that only copies of the same binary
serialize and deserialize objects, which is sufficient for a "single
binary / multiple data" programming model such as in MPI and PVM. It may
then be possible in MLton to include function pointers in objects to be
transmitted, which has been possible in OCaml for a few years already.

I noticed that Matthew is also working on the Manticore project. Could
Manticore be suitable not only for many-core processors but also for a
cluster of say 32 PCs, each with a multi or many core processor?

It is these kinds of clusters that I intend to run on, either my own
cluster with 32 PCs or the Titan cluster in Oslo with more than a
thousand.



Cheers,

Roland