Re: OCaml and kernels (was: Re: [Caml-list] Jane Street is hiring)

[David MENTRE <dmentre@linux-france.org>]

Hello,

2009/8/18 Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>:
> It's relatively low-level when you need it to be, and it wouldn't be
> too much work to separate out the runtime and reimplement it on top of
> baremetal.

I've done part of this in the past (KOS is not bare metal but a kernel
nonetheless):
 http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2005/01/cf207671ce0efc6bf58f710b230e06e2.en.html

>  It would also be interesting to see if the supposed
> massive overheads of garbage collection are in reality better than
> bloating every structure with an additional reference count field.

I share the same feeling.

There were experiments of implementing kernel functionalities like TCP
stack in ML-like languages, e.g. "A Structured TCP in Standard ML
(1994)" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.35.8383)
or "A Network Protocol Stack in Standard ML"
(http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.11.8546)

Yours,
d.