From: William Chesters <williamc@dai.ed.ac.uk>
To: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: ocaml limitations
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 12:34:15 GMT [thread overview]
Message-ID: <15716.199912131234@turriff> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <199912130434.XAA12728@gs176.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
John Carol Langford writes:
> The performance problems from two limitations. The first is in the
> compiler and runtime - it's the limitation on the array size on 32 bit
> machines - I only have linux PC's available to work on.
I think this has been worked on by David McClain:
http://caml.inria.fr/caml-list/1041.html
> The second problem is a language failure - there is no 'short int'
> type in ocaml.
The underlying problem is that for important reasons of GC efficiency
etc., ocaml (like nearly all other GCd languages) works on word-sized
objects only, i.e. 32 or 64 bits. To support access to a smaller
granularity, like 16 bits, it's necessary to do something like how the
`string' type is implemented, with some slightly hacky arithmetic for
working out its length. I don't think that would be difficult to
duplicate for 16 bit numbers, seeing as how the compiler code is so
pretty but would have to be careful to use unsafe_get.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1999-12-13 16:27 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1999-12-13 4:34 John Carol Langford
1999-12-13 12:34 ` William Chesters [this message]
1999-12-14 12:31 ` Xavier Leroy
1999-12-15 3:06 ` John Carol Langford
1999-12-13 19:18 David McClain
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=15716.199912131234@turriff \
--to=williamc@dai.ed.ac.uk \
--cc=caml-list@inria.fr \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox