Re: [Caml-list] Interactive technical computing

[Michael Vanier <mvanier@cs.caltech.edu>]

I agree 100%.  This is the biggest limitation to using ocaml for large projects. 
  If it were fixed, ocaml would become an unstoppable juggernaut ;-)

Here's a paper describing an approach to this problem for an extended version of 
Standard ML:

http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/Papers/abstracts/missing-link.html

This actually goes further than dynamic linking to provide a full component 
model.  What I wouldn't give to see this in ocaml.

Mike

Richard Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 03:26:03PM -0600, Robert Fischer wrote:
>>> Putting aside the obvious cultural resistance to using a sensible
>>> language for this project, there is one technical hurdle: It needs to
>>> compile into a DLL which can be linked to other programs (in C and
>>> other languages).  I can't generate such code using ocamlopt, at least
>>> not without using unsupported out-of-tree extensions.
>>>
>> I don't think this is a real hurdle to general adoption of a language.
>> After all, Java and C# aren't intended to be used like that, yet they
>> certainly have wide-spread adoption.
> 
> It is a hurdle because not all programming is writing end-user
> application code.
> 
> In fact what is somewhat sad is that OCaml (unlike Java and C#) can
> compile to native code which really has very minimal "environmental
> needs" - just a smallish library of functions and a GC which is
> written on top of C's malloc.  So really it could be an ideal
> replacement for libraries written in C, where the heavy lifting is
> done in OCaml and there are some thin bindings to provide a C API.
> 
> Rich.
>