[Caml-list] Re: Completeness of Unix library

[Vasili Galchin <vasiliocaml@yahoo.com>]

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Hello,

   Judging by the replies there seem to be several
issues vis-a-vis the Unix library. 

   
   1) Below is email that Gregoire sent to me
personally. (Gregfoire, I hope you are not angry at me
 for posting your email to me). I have looked at his
code only very quickly. I saw that someone else has
also added socket functionality but I am sorry I have
not yet read it yet. I made a (feeble??) attempt at
adding ipv4 multicast functionality (because multicast
is lacking). Gregoire code seems to have implemented
very complete and very elegant. Please see next point.

   2) I am an old man (53). I have worked in industry
for 28 years in US (the headquarters for uber
pragmatism!!! ... sorry to say frequently we sacrifice
quality for time). It seems like a lot of you have
done very nice and excellent/elegant work vis-a-vis
the "Unix" library. 

Question: why has not all this work  been folded into
the OCaml run-time library? I.e. there seems to be a
backlog of very valuable contributions that would make
OCaml compete with C/C++ ... oh yes in industry
managers will point at OCaml and say " ah ha ... it
has many holes!!!".


Lecture: ( gentle lecture from an older person) Before
I die I would really like to see declarative
lanaguages, e.g. functional languages, logic
languages, etc. "catch" on in industry. I see OCaml as
a very good candidate based on the existing code base.
Every day I write in imperative languages like C/C++
which have a host of correctness problems (memory
leaks) and expressibility problems (functions are not
1st class citizens). I don't want to see OCaml be a
science project. It seems to need a complete POSIX API
library (and  possibly Win32 API library).  

3) Frankly I think that instead of Unix library it
should be called the POSIX library.

4) Based on the counterpostings, I am thinking that
maybe a (the?) solution is for the "Unix" library to
be broken up into several libraries (OCaml modules)
under a POSIX directory with subdirectories (e.g. a
socket subdirectory). Afterall if you look at
Gregfoire's work on sockets, his new code ONLY deals
with sockets. Bottom line: I really think that the
Unix/POSIX support needs to be split up. I haven't
looked at the POSIX standard in a while so I am not
sure how to do that. Of course, we don't want to
rebuild the Pyramid of Cheops, i.e. perhaps this is
something that can be phased in (industry programmer
talking).

5) Another issue is how to merge ipv4 and ipv6!? 

I hope I have made some sense. I also sorry I cannot
find how to turn off HTML (Mozilla).


Kind regards, vasili
--- Gregoire HENRY <gregoire.henry@etu.upmc.fr> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> >      I have added so far the multicast join and
> drop functionality to the unix (and threads) OCaml
> library. I have tested this functionality and it
> works. I do want to respect what has been
> implemented in the past (very fine work). I looked
> carefully at the various setsockopt functions in
> unix.mli and the multicast work didn't seem to fit
> easily within the bool, int, float paradigmn because
> the setsockopt call for multicast passes in a
> structure plus the setsockopt "level" actual
> parameter is not SOL_SOCKET (i.e. we are setting
> socket state at a different level, i.e. IPPROTO_IP).
> Hence, I implemented as two functions,
> multicast_join and multicast_drop. I, of course,
> amenable to changes in what I have done. Is there a
> code review process in order to get something into
> the mainline of OCaml?? Please someone supply me
> with details.
> 
> I believe there is no special review process yet,
> except perhaps filling a request's bug and attach
> your patch :
> http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> 
> BTW, I missed your previous mail but I make some
> preliminary work
> this summer on bindings OCaml with IPv6 socket
> interface (RFC 3493).
> In particulary, introduce a new
> setsockopt_multicast.
> 
> I would be pleased to compare with your
> implementation.
> You can found mine here : 
> http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~henry/ip6/
> 
> regards,
> -- Gregoire Henry


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