From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id q26ESCI1018905 for ; Tue, 6 Mar 2012 15:28:12 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: Ai8CAEEeVk/UGyoCkWdsb2JhbABDsWmDAiIBAQEBCQsLBxQDJIF9AQEFOEARCxgJFg8JAwIBAgFFEwgBAYgHuRKNPIMiBJU/hWONFw X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.73,540,1325458800"; d="scan'208";a="147831511" Received: from smtp2-g21.free.fr ([212.27.42.2]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 06 Mar 2012 15:28:06 +0100 Received: from [193.55.250.217] (chercheurs2-217.saclay.inria.fr [193.55.250.217]) (Authenticated sender: tiphaine.turpin) by smtp2-g21.free.fr (Postfix) with ESMTPA id 4B94C4B019C for ; Tue, 6 Mar 2012 15:28:00 +0100 (CET) Message-ID: <4F561EEF.5090006@free.fr> Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:27:59 +0100 From: Tiphaine Turpin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111109 Thunderbird/3.1.16 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: caml-list@inria.fr References: <4F452F9F.4050203@inria.fr> <20120306120209.GA25938@upsilon.cc> In-Reply-To: <20120306120209.GA25938@upsilon.cc> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] TypeRex release 1.0.0 candidate 1 On 06/03/2012 13:02, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > [...] > At the same time, I'm not thrilled at the idea of having to use a > different ocamlc just to benefit from TypeRex. Having to do so brings a > number of disadvantages, the first and foremost being that now the > programmer needs to worry about having synchronized versions of the > "legacy" ocamlc installed on his machine and the version shipped by > TypeRex. First, a small precision (which may not be obvious from TypeRex documentation): as the ocp-ocamlc, ... commands are only wrappers, they are not tied to a particular version of the actual compilers they call. In fact the following three components are somehow independent: - the installed OCaml compilers (currently only 3.12.* is supported, because by mistake we forgot to include 3.11 compatibility, will be fixed in 1.0.0) - TypeRex (with ocp-type and ocp-ocamlc, etc.) - the OCaml compiler used to compile TypeRex (since rc2, >=3.11 works) However, TypeRex won't be able to handle new language constructs that are introduced in OCaml after we extract its front-end, which implies that: - we will have too follow closely the language evolutions and we will release a new version of TypeRex for each major release of OCaml. - using Typerex for developping the OCaml compiler prevents you to use the new language constructs that you introduce, until TypeRex is itself updated. > But there are more disadvantages, unfortunately. > > Can you tell us why we can't (or maybe *when* we will be able to :-)) > have the nice features offered by TypeRex on top of the stock ocamlc > compiler? We would like to have the binary annotation feature included in the next release of OCaml. Before proposing a patch upstream, we wanted to stabilize the changes in the compiler and prove them to be generic enough. But there are two alternatives to having binary annotations in OCaml: - improve the ease of use of the wrappers (there have been interesting suggestions in this direction on the issue tracker) - integrate with a build system (which would also replace the ad-hoc .typerex file) Tiphaine