[MLton] Trip Report -- Commercial Users of Functional Programming
Daniel C. Wang
danwang@CS.Princeton.EDU
Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:14:32 -0400
In all seriousness, I suggest there be some serious consideration to taking
the F# fronted and retrageting it to run on MLton. I really, like to think
of MLTon as some amazing compiler technology that happens to have an SML
frontend. If MLTon suddenly started to suport a very interesting OCaml
subset I think many people would take notice.
Since, I think F# bootstraps. The low fuss hack is to take the frontend and
add a prettying pass that spits the elaborated IL out as a valid SML program.
Then you can compile that with MLTon. With a little extra dancing you can
avoid the pretty-printing phase and just link the F# frontend converted to
SML as if were native SML code.
I suggest stealing the F# frontend, rather than the actual Ocaml frontend
because I suspect it is less crufty than the current Ocaml frontend, and
I'll bet it is more suited to this high-level source to source translation
approach than the current Ocaml compiler from Inria.
Stephen Weeks wrote:
>>Were there any SML users?
>
>
> Other than me, sadly not. At least not currently. Galois did use
> SML for one of their early projects where the CKit came in handy. But
> they're pretty much a Haskell shop these days.
>
> I of course mentioned the wonders of MLton/SML to those who would
> listen. :-)
>