[MLton] questions on mlton

Heath Putnam hp@heathputnam.com
10 Nov 2004 23:52:59 -0800


Stephen and Matthew, 

Thanks for all the info. 

My email was a bit ambiguous. I grabbed a distribution 2 days ago, and
since then you've done a new release that includes OpenBSD -- so I
won't need to do a "port" of MLton to OpenBSD.

When I mentioned a ping/pong benchmark, I meant ping/pong in the CML
sense, not the networking sense.

I really understand the bit about any CML program working unchanged in
sml/NJ or MLton. I'm primarily using Scheme-48 and its implementation
of CML. In order to see how much faster SML is for the same tasks, I
wrote a simple translator to translate my Scheme-48 program to SML,
and I tested with sml/nj. Tonight I hope to test with the new MLton.

I asked about the details of MLton's threads because it seems easy to
get this stuff wrong. E.g. deadlocked heavyweight threads (from
speculative communication) that can't get reclaimed, space leaks (as
described in "Safe-for-Space threads in Standard ML") or uncaught
exception funniness.

Heath