Most projects are either academic research or industrial products. In
academia, reinventing a common language run-time won't get funding because
it is not novel enough. In industry, products that aren't economically
viable in the mid-term (years) or sooner won't get funding. So the common
solutions don't work here.

 

There are at least two alternatives. One is to join forces with a massive
company like Microsoft who are willing to risk comparatively huge lead
times, as they did with .NET, but the result will be proprietary. The other
is to earn millions yourself and invest in the R&D that you think will be
most beneficial, as Stephen Wolfram did.

 

Perhaps another alternative would be to adopt Microsoft's CLR and focus on
creating an open source implementation that has a working garbage collector
and decent performance.

 

Also, interoperability is not the only benefit of a common language
run-time. Another major benefit is maturity: because you have multiple
languages sitting on top of the same run-time all of the programs in all of
those languages are testing your run-time.

 

Cheers,

Jon.

 

From: Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons [mailto:dofp.ocaml@gmail.com] 
Sent: 10 December 2011 10:36
To: caml-list
Subject: [Caml-list] Why isn't there a common platform for functional
language interaction ?

 

    Caml-list,

Given that other people are raising trolls, here is mine...

I have to admit I appreciate F# transparent interaction with C# libraries
which allows me to use large amounts of code that I would have had to poorly
rewrite otherwise (GUI, database, web stuff, etc). Same happens with SML,
Caml, Haskell and F#, some pieces of code are just way better in one
language than in the others, and you end partially porting these libraries
to Caml which is a waste of time and you don't benefit from the updates of
the original code and nobody but you can maintain your quick-and-dirty port.

Why isn't there a core functional languages to which everyone could compile,
on which the compiler research could be done (certification, optimisation,
garbage collection) and that would allow full interaction of the different
dialects at run-time ?

At some point I thought that C-- (http://www.cminusminus.org/index.html) and
that type of work would converge to that but it never happened.

        Diego Olivier