[MLton-user] mlton and emacs flymake mode

[Matthew Fluet]

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Michael Norrish
<Michael.Norrish at nicta.com.au> wrote:
> Has anyone tried using mlton as a syntax-checker for emacs' flymake mode?
>  My experience with mlton is that it does syntax and type-checking pretty
> quickly, so it doesn't seem completely out of the question that it might be
> usable in this mode.
>
> I don't know how often flymake calls its checkers, but I'd hope it would be
> configurable so that even a slow mlton-check would be something it could
> slot in.

I haven't tried the flymake mode.  I looked at the flymake webpage
briefly --- one thing to bear in mind is that it sounds like it makes
a temporary copy of the current buffer and passes that off to the
syntax checker.  As a syntax checker, MLton will do fine with an
isolated file, but you will probably need to weed out the
type-checking errors.  This would be especially true in a large
project organized with .sml files; most isolated .sml files won't type
check.  It might not be terribly difficult to add a "-stop sc"
(syntax-check) option to only scan/parse and not type check.