On Jan 15, 2008 10:26 PM, Jacques GARRIGUE <garrigue@math.nagoya-u.ac.jp>
wrote:

>
> I'm not so sure. Actually, I do it all the time when recompiling
> ocaml. Otherwise I would have to bootstrap after any modification in
> the compiler. Fortunately, this is not the case, and one only needs to
> bootstrap when the data structures are modified (or semantics changed).
>

I agree.  We quite often use marshal to share data between different
programs that share a common library.


> I don't agree with all these points (otherwise I wouldn't be
> maintaining a GUI toolkit), but there is some truth in it. I actually
> got similar reactions from industry in Japan, if for different
> reasons: they don't need the GUI, because they prefer to do it
> themselves, to differentiate from others. People doing in-house
> programming have a different point of view. I remember somebody from a
> bank who told me he wrote a program to be used in all their branches
> using labltk. In this case you don't need anything flashy, it just has
> to be functional (err, to work).
>

We started out doing entirely back-end processes using OCaml, but as time
went on, we started building more and more GUIs.  The fact that OCaml has
lablgtk makes it much more useful for us, without a doubt.  The main reason
we like to do GUIs in OCaml is that we see a lot of value in sharing type
definitions and code between the GUIs and the back-end services they connect
to.

y