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 WAA07130 for caml-red; Sat, 6 Jan 2001 22:02:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id XAA18095 for ; Thu, 4 Jan 2001 23:18:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from cmailg5.svr.pol.co.uk (cmailg5.svr.pol.co.uk [195.92.195.175]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f04MI6L17918 for ; Thu, 4 Jan 2001 23:18:06 +0100 (MET) Received: from modem-28.glucophage.dialup.pol.co.uk ([62.136.206.28] helo=baby) by cmailg5.svr.pol.co.uk with smtp (Exim 3.13 #0) id 14EIhs-0000hy-00; Thu, 04 Jan 2001 22:18:01 +0000 Message-ID: <004501c0769e$58e09f00$1cce883e@baby> From: "Jonathan Coupe" To: "Joseph R. Kiniry" , References: <70270000.978548769@kind.kindsoftware.com> Subject: Re: JIT-compilation for OCaml? Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 22:32:44 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr > > And that is exactly the problem in my situation. The investors (myself > being one of them) weren't that concerned with the choice of a > non-mainstream/modern language/system for technical reasons, but we were > entirely for many, many business reasons. > > > I'm sorry, I should have been more explicit. I meant that if you are > developing and Open Source product and you'd like large scale involvement, > choosing OCaml as a source language isn't in your best interest. While it > is true that you are likely to get higher quality people involved, the > source pool is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of Java. > > Joe > -- > Joseph R. Kiniry http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~kiniry/ > California Institute of Technology ID 78860581 ICQ 4344804 Ironically, my experience would suggest the opposite regarding the acceptability of Java vs OCaml on business grounds. The project you're working on seems to be an ALife video game (a fairly established genre by now, which is beneficial if you go after investment.) The major source of funding for such projects is from existing videogame publishers - VC's are highly allergic to entertainment software. And the videogame industry does not favour Java, even as a scripting language. (I won't go into the reasons for this, or whether that view is correct.) The use of game scripting languages with very similar characteristics toOCaml is well accepted however - search +GOOL +"Crash Bandicoot" for an example. Typically game companies write their own scripting languages. Using a well-supported and tested open source language may well be an idea whose time has come. The key questions in my mind are how well OCaml works in a situatuion when its being called from a C++/C program, and how easily portable it is to new platforms (contrarily, I haven't heard of any plans to launch a high performance Java compiler for the PS2.) As for the lack of experienced OCaml programmers, competent programmers in the videogame industry have learnt Lisp-based languages like GOOL, or pure(ish) OO languages in just days, often with only experience of C to draw upon. For an open source project, things may be different. My impression is, however, that Java is considered extremely uncool by the open source community, partly because of licensing issues, partly because some many influential members of the community don't like Java. C, Perl, Python, TCL - and even the Squeak dialect of Smalltalk and Scheme (consider GIMP and Guile) - seem to rate much higher. Jonathan Coupe