[Caml-list] Attn: Development Editor, Latest OCaml Weekly News

Alan Schmitt
2022-08-23T08:06:48Z

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Hello

Here is the latest OCaml Weekly News, for the week of August 16 to 23,
2022.

Table of Contents
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Writing a transpiler from PHP to polyglot PHP+C code
How to speed up this function?
Old CWN

Writing a transpiler from PHP to polyglot PHP+C code
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Archive:
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/discussion-writing-a-transpiler-from-php-to-polyglot-php-c-code/10301/4>

Deep in this thread, Olle Härstedt announced
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Made a small prototype here, very standard thing:
<https://github.com/olleharstedt/pholyglot/tree/main/src>

Parser and lexer in Menhir, AST that represents the subset PHP lang,
then I'd have to iterate over it to infer some types, transform to
polyglot AST and from there to string.

The one thing to make it more professional would be proper error
messages for the end user… But you have to carry file and line in the
AST, right? Maybe I can google around. :thinking:

How to speed up this function?
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Archive:
<https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/how-to-speed-up-this-function/10286/29>

Deep in a huge discussion, Yaron Minsky said
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From our perspective at Jane Street, unboxed types is a /very/ high
priority. A large slice of the team is thinking about it, and Chris
Casinghino and Richard Eisenberg have joined recently and have it as
their primary focus, along with Antal.

In terms of when it makes it upstream, that's less clear. We're
working hard on getting out some initial versions done, and we plan on
iterating internally, where it's easier for us to try things out and
then change them as we go. Once we have a design that we really
believe in, we intend to propose it upstream, but how quickly that
goes (and whether it's successful at all!) depends on whether upstream
maintainers and the larger community find the improvements compelling.

In any case, I find this conversation encouraging, since it suggests
there's some real hunger for improvements in this space.

I expect ICFP in particular to be a good opportunity for people to
learn more about the work we're doing both here, and also on type-safe
stack allocation. (For what it's worth, the latter is already in
production internally and looks very promising.)

If you'll be at ICFP:

• Richard Eisenberg will be giving a [talk on unboxed types] at the ML
workshop
• Stephen Dolan will be giving a [talk on stack allocation] at the
OCaml Users and Developers Workshop.

[talk on unboxed types]
<https://icfp22.sigplan.org/details/mlfamilyworkshop-2022-papers/13/Unboxed-types-for-OCaml>

[talk on stack allocation]
<https://icfp22.sigplan.org/details/ocaml-2022-papers/9/Stack-allocation-for-OCaml>

Old CWN
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[Alan Schmitt]

[send me a message] <mailto:alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org>

[the archive] <https://alan.petitepomme.net/cwn/>

[RSS feed of the archives] <https://alan.petitepomme.net/cwn/cwn.rss>

[online] <http://lists.idyll.org/listinfo/caml-news-weekly/>

[Alan Schmitt] <https://alan.petitepomme.net/>

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