From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on yquem.inria.fr X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=AWL autolearn=disabled version=3.1.3 X-Original-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 60671BC69 for ; Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:30:35 +0200 (CEST) Received: from ipmail01.adl2.internode.on.net (ipmail01.adl2.internode.on.net [203.16.214.140]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id l7LAUWJw000381 for ; Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:30:34 +0200 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AgAAAC5ZykY7pw2h/2dsb2JhbAAMBpgIJA X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.19,289,1183300200"; d="scan'208";a="176725917" Received: from ppp59-167-13-161.lns2.syd7.internode.on.net (HELO [192.168.1.201]) ([59.167.13.161]) by ipmail01.adl2.internode.on.net with ESMTP; 21 Aug 2007 20:00:29 +0930 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] If OCaml were a car From: skaller To: Oliver Bandel Cc: Caml-list List In-Reply-To: <1187689892.46cab5a45112e@webmail.in-berlin.de> References: <20070818192157.GA11789@furbychan.cocan.org> <6806cf750708181324l724823c6w304f9088980c3316@mail.gmail.com> <46C76557.5050308@cs.caltech.edu> <56864F61-40F3-4F03-9823-6D510AD5320B@epfl.ch> <1187639685.46c9f1859d769@webmail.in-berlin.de> <1187657274.18344.9.camel@rosella.wigram> <1187689892.46cab5a45112e@webmail.in-berlin.de> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:30:28 +1000 Message-Id: <1187692228.7354.21.camel@rosella.wigram> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.10.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Miltered: at concorde with ID 46CABEC9.000 by Joe's j-chkmail (http://j-chkmail . ensmp . fr)! X-Spam: no; 0.00; ocaml:01 0200,:01 bandel:01 ocaml:01 gtk:01 arrays:01 doubly:01 hash:01 refusal:98 offerings:98 threads:01 threads:01 sourceforge:01 sourceforge:01 imho:01 On Tue, 2007-08-21 at 11:51 +0200, Oliver Bandel wrote: > Zitat von skaller : > > (1.a) lack of dynamic loading (of native code) > > -- hopefully to be fixed in 3.11 > [...] > > Would be fine, but is not that necessary. > It's absolutely mandatory. Just consider a web browser executing compiled client script to see this. > > > > (1.b) lack of multi-processing > > You mean parallelization on many processors? Yes. > Well, Unix.fork could help, No, it can't "help": some applications can be built that way, with suitable message passing protocols. Others required shared data. Also note, you can't effectively use both threads and (forked) processes because Unix is a mess. Quite a few applications use threads, which precludes forking (completely separate processes are OK of course). > or OCamlP3l. Indeed, but that's not Ocaml. > > (2.a) interoperability > > -- with C libraries > > -- with .NET libraries (F# isn't Ocaml) > > What do you mean with interoperability here? Sharing data and control across language boundaries. > You have the possibility to marry C and OCaml, > and it's relatively easy, compared to Perl > for example (which is very ugly with that XS-stuff). It's extremely hard, and it's very expensive, compared to sharing between C and C++, or C++ and Felix, or between any .NET languages. Perhaps by easy you mean the effort to handle "two functions". Now try to wrap a library like GTK with hundreds or even thousands of functions! > > (2.b) refusal of Inria team to provide a more complete library > > I do not really miss a lot in the library. > Some more functions would be fine, but the missings > are not so big, IMHO. Lots of really basic things are missing, for example re-entrant regular expressions, variable length arrays, doubly linked lists, sequential hash tables, and a heap of other data structures which are either basic, or common in other systems. > Does Perl have an ISO-standard? Perl is dead. > Or the ugly Visual Basic, which some big companies > really are using? No idea, but most of the new Microsoft offerings have ECMA standards backing either extant or planned. > I think an ISO-standard could be fine, but it is not > the criteria, why companies decide to use a language. Often it is. Do you know why C++ was standardised? Because (I think it was Hewlett Packard) wanted to do some USA Federal Government contractsusing it, and an ANSI Standardised language was a requirement of the contracts. Many big military contracts mandate Ada. Standards are vital for big projects. > IMHO, many (most) things that are used in industry are really bad > things. And people insist on using bad langauges and bad systems, > because they are accustomed to it, and some Lobbyists > sell that stuff. Many of the industrially used languages are not so good: it's annoying the designers don't listen to academia. But then, the academics don't bother to listen to industry either .. :) -- John Skaller Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net