[MLton] Growing the user base...

[Stephen Weeks]

> BTW.. I'm teaching the PL course at Princeton this year and would
> have liked to use MLTon because of the FFI. In particular I wanted
> to do a cool project with OpenGL and MLTon. MLton's FFI seems less
> of a hassle then SML/NJ in this respect.

Sounds great, and I agree with everything Matthew said.  I'm only
worried about the "would have" part :-).  Have you decided not to use
it?

> I'm not sure what plans you have for debugging.

I'm not either.  We've talked at times about various ideas, but
nothing is anywhere close to happening.  Norman Ramsey has also
indicated an interest in extending his debugging stuff to work with
MLton, but that work also hasn't even started.

> Also, a very unsexy but useful thing to do, would be to take some of
> the ideas for SML.NET integration into Visual Studio, and either
> integrate MLton into the tool chain or build a similar interface to
> an open source project like Eclipse.

I would certainly like to see both of these, and would do them in a
second if someone funded me.  And of course, we would help someone
trying to do it too.  In the absence of that, there is still other
stuff that offers more benefit for the amount of effort I can put in
(e.g. MacOS port, interpreter).