Re: [Caml-list] [announce] O'Browser : OCaml on browsers

[Benjamin Canou <benjamin.canou@gmail.com>]

  Hi,

>From Kuba Ober:
> Pardon the question, but is this meant to be "useful" in the future,
> or is it just a fun experiment (in which case the next target should
> be brainfuck).
Coming soon: the OCaml VM on a turing machine !

>From Burgisser Francois :
> Good idea but maybe a browser plugin to manipulate DOM would be much
> more efficient.
>From Gabriel Kerneis:
> But, sadly, much less portable.
>From Jon Harrop:
> Could you write a compiler and call eval to get better performance?
>From David Thomas:
> I'd like to see a plugin that makes available to JS a function to
> execute ocaml bytecode.

Our plan is to achieve efficiency with a (not yet available) browser
plug-in (the original bytecode interpreter or the native compiler) while
remaining portable by using the JavaScript VM where the plug-in is not
available. So we don't currently focus on optimizing (and complexifying)
too much the JavaScript version.

>From David Teller:
> To me, the fact that you can write portable lightweight applets sounds
> like a good enough reason. That and the fact that I can see this being
> used by stuff like Ocsigen to make for (even) richer client-server
> applications.

Indeed, as Vincent wrote, even if O'Browser is at this point only a
client-side scripting core, it takes place into the Ocsigen project and
will be used to interact with (OCaml) server code (in its current form
or not).

  Benjamin Canou.