RE: [Caml-list] about OcamIL

[Jon Harrop <jonathandeanharrop@googlemail.com>]

Raoul Duke wrote:
> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 11:59 AM, ben kuin <benkuin@gmail.com> wrote:
> > but that would be the big benefit of a clr like vm: It doesn't matter
> > how messed up, chaotic or just heterogen the environment is as long
> > as you can count on a regular execution of your portable bytecode.
> 
> of course it matters: there must be the resources to get the vm ported
> across all the fubar variations of the ecosystem. the combinatorics
> has to be dealt with somewhere. that kind of complexity is less in the
> hegemonic windows os world, i hypothesize.

Not really. Windows supports a far wider variety of hardware than Linux and
Apple supports even less. Providing consistency was one of the major
advantages of .NET that had people building on it originally. If you want
robustly-deployable hardware-accelerated GUI apps then WPF and, therefore,
.NET is your only choice on Windows and you have zero choices on Linux. If
you wanted to build something comparable on Linux you would use OpenGL and
must then test all software/hardware combinations to see which were
unreliable (OpenGL drivers are often very unreliable on Linux).

I saw this first hand when I productized OpenGL-based presentation software
written in OCaml. It was a catastrophe: with segfaults on 80% of customers
machines that we could not reproduce. We canned it and never tried to sell
Linux-based software again.

Cheers,
Jon.