From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id WAA27641 for caml-redistribution; Sun, 24 Jan 1999 22:39:26 +0100 (MET) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id WAA29736 for ; Sun, 24 Jan 1999 22:25:40 +0100 (MET) Received: from goose.prod.itd.earthlink.net (goose.prod.itd.earthlink.net [207.217.120.18]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id WAA08341 for ; Sun, 24 Jan 1999 22:25:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from maya (1Cust241.tnt1.league-city.tx.da.uu.net [208.251.183.241]) by goose.prod.itd.earthlink.net (8.8.7/8.8.5) with SMTP id NAA15936 for ; Sun, 24 Jan 1999 13:25:36 -0800 (PST) From: Miles Egan Reply-To: cullenx@earthlink.net To: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Looking for a nail Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 15:06:05 -0600 X-Mailer: KMail [version 0.7.9] Content-Type: text/plain MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <99012415253804.01196@maya> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: weis I've been working with OCaml on my own for the past two weeks or so and think I'm finally ready to take on a real project. I feel like I've just come upon a beautiful new hammer and I want to find some nails to hit with it. I'd like to work on something that might help raise OCaml's visibility among the Linux hacker community. A few projects have occurred to me already: 1. Extend OCaml's Unix library. What's already there is very useful, but there are quite a few functions missing. I'd be happy to help fill this out, although I'm new enough to OCaml and functional programming that I'm still not sure if some Unix functions were omitted because of their stateful semantics. 2. Build a GTK+ wrapper. I know there was some discussion of this earlier. Is anyone still working on this? I think a robust, comprehensive GTK+ interface would make OCaml a stronger candidate for a lot of burgeoning open-source projects. Again, I'm new enough to this that I'm still not sure if languages like OCaml are a good fit for GUI work, but it seems to me that OCaml's mix of imperative and functional features should provide enough flexibility for something like this. 3. Rewrite some of the GNU build tools, autoconf, automake etc. in OCaml. It seems to me that OCaml would be a marvelous language for building these kinds of tools; their current m4 / perl implementation seems inelegant to me. On the other hand, the FSF seems to favor scheme, so they may not be receptive to OCaml implementations ( I haven't asked ). I'd appreciate any criticisms of these projects or any suggestions for others. My goal is to do my small part to promote OCaml ( while having fun hacking with it ) and to try to show the open-source community what a boon a tool like OCaml can be. With a bit of luck, maybe one day I can earn a living writing OCaml instead of C++. :) -- miles