Re: automatic construction of mli files

[Damien Doligez <Damien.Doligez@inria.fr>]

>From: Jean-Christophe Filliatre <filliatr@csl.sri.com>

>In the  extreme situation where there  is no real need  for writing an
>interface, you can either simply not write one (this is not mandatory)
>or generate it from the code with "ocamlc -c -i".

There are two technical details you should all know concerning .mli
files:

1.  If you don't use .mli files, or if you generate them automatically
    from the corresponding .ml files, then you lose separate
    compilation: whenever you change a semicolon in foo.ml, all
    the files that depend on module Foo will have to be recompiled.
    This may or may not be a big problem depending on the size of your
    project.

2.  Due to rather complex implementation issues, if you don't use .mli
    files and let the compiler generate the .cmi from the .ml, then
    garbage collection will be slightly slower.  If you do it for all
    your files, you might lose as much as 8% on the speed of your
    program.

-- Damien