Re: [Caml-list] Smoke Vector Graphics: source code licenses for sale

[Alexandre Pilkiewicz <alexandre.pilkiewicz@polytechnique.org>]

Le Sunday 04 November 2007 17:12:01 skaller, vous avez écrit :
> Lack of commercial support -- the kind Jon is offering --
> is one of the impediments to industry taking Ocaml seriously.


Don't you think the worst problem for the industry is the lack of 
retro-compatibility ? 

Between 3.09 and 3.10 (a *minor* version number change), a lot of program 
using camlp4 stopped compiling. If a company has a 100 000 lines code (or 
more) to revise just for that, it could be kind of a problem.

And so many things are just unspecified. I know it's a bad idea, whatever 
language you use, to rely on the order of evaluation of the argument of a 
function, but to say "this order may change one day" is to tell 
industrialists : "if you have some "not so good" programmers, even if you 
make all the test you want on your program to check it works, one day it may 
just stop working because we changed the order or evaluation, or worst, a lot 
of silent bugs can appear". 
Do you imagine that a car constructor with nice screw-down-robots would accept 
if a provider says "I have very nice and efficient screws, but it is possible 
that one day, you have to turn them anticlockwise if I realize it's more 
efficient." ?

IMO it is the real show-stopper for an industrial use of OCaml


Alexandre Pilkiewicz