[Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[Noel Welsh]

Hi all,

I'm writing a commercial application in O'Caml.  We
need to run on all the main platforms (Linux, Windows
and Mac) and we'd like to use the native code compiler
and threads.

My first question: does O'Caml support threads in
compiled code in all the above platforms?  (It's ok if
Mac support is pending but Windows support is
essential.)

My second question: how do I get threads to work?  I'm
currently developing on Linux and there is no
threads.cmxa in my /usr/lib/ocaml (3.04 via Debian). 
The O'Caml book suggests I need to download and
compile my own ocamlopt including pthreads support. 
Is this correct?  What do I do for Windows?

Thanks,
Noel

PS:  Markus, I know you'll be reading this.  I still
prefer Scheme!!!! ;-)

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Re: [Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[Remi VANICAT]

Noel Welsh <noelwelsh@yahoo.com> writes:

> Hi all,
> 
[...]
> 
> My second question: how do I get threads to work?  I'm
> currently developing on Linux and there is no
> threads.cmxa in my /usr/lib/ocaml (3.04 via Debian). 
> The O'Caml book suggests I need to download and
> compile my own ocamlopt including pthreads support. 
> Is this correct?  What do I do for Windows?

I believe that the ocaml package on debian is already compiled with
the pthread (and there is a threads.cmxa in my
/usr/lib/ocaml/threads).

one have to compile program with the -threads option and the the
threads.cmxa library, and it should work.

-- 
Rémi Vanicat
vanicat@labri.u-bordeaux.fr
http://dept-info.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/~vanicat
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Re: [Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[Markus Mottl]

Hi Noel,

long time no see! Welcome on this list! :-)

On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Noel Welsh wrote:
> I'm writing a commercial application in O'Caml.

Hopefully in the field of AI?

> PS:  Markus, I know you'll be reading this.  I still
> prefer Scheme!!!! ;-)

Still... - but not for long if you stay on this list ;-)

Only a few weeks ago I managed to convert some staunch CL-programming
colleague to OCaml (after one year of merciless proselytizing!).

Since then he has become a devote follower: whenever he runs into
a difficult programming task now, instead of helplessly exclaiming
"O God?", as he did before, he confidently prays "O'Caml!".

Now I am looking for my next victim, hm... :-)

Cheers,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl                                             markus@oefai.at
Austrian Research Institute
for Artificial Intelligence                  http://www.oefai.at/~markus
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[Caml-list] Proselytizing

[Charles Martin]

>Only a few weeks ago I managed to convert some staunch CL-programming
>colleague to OCaml (after one year of merciless proselytizing!).

I ran into some old colleagues a while back, to whom I extolled the virtues of OCaml.  It turned out that "write it in ML" was a private joke between them, as in, "having trouble with that problem? write it in ML! ha ha ha"

They were shocked to discover that I, an inveterate CL/Scheme devotee back in the old days, had gone over to the dark side.

By the way, I scanned the new translated OCaml book and I have to say, it is a very impressive piece of work.  The publication of this and Benjamin Pierce's new book might help OCaml past the inflection point.

Maybe we just need to extol the "disruptive" nature of OCaml :)
(http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/020424.html)

Charles


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Re: [Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[james woodyatt]

On Thursday, April 18, 2002, at 12:45 AM, Noel Welsh wrote:
>
> My first question: does O'Caml support threads in
> compiled code in all the above platforms?  (It's ok if
> Mac support is pending but Windows support is
> essential.)

Thread support in native code on Mac OS X is basically not there.  
That's because the POSIX threads library in Mac OS X 10.1 is 
insufficiently featureful.  I'm told by reliable source that the POSIX 
thread support in the next version of Mac OS X will be much improved.  
Whether and when that meanders its way into a working Ocaml kit is a 
hard guess.


--
j h woodyatt <jhw@wetware.com>

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Re: [Caml-list] Proselytizing

[David Chase]

At 10:06 AM 4/18/2002 -0700, Charles Martin wrote:
>>Only a few weeks ago I managed to convert some staunch CL-programming
>>colleague to OCaml (after one year of merciless proselytizing!).
>...
>By the way, I scanned the new translated OCaml book and I have to say, it is a very impressive piece of work.  The publication of this and Benjamin Pierce's new book might help OCaml past the inflection point.

Slightly better packaging/checking on the demos would be a good thing.

I am trying, as hard as possible in my non-copious free time,
to get past my own inflection point, and one sticking point is
confusion with CamlTk.  I thought it worked -- it's clearly
"here" enough to run the browser, and I did the load and execute
game in the scripting window, but when I try the examples, it
fails to find it:

-- Making all in camltk
(This program requires the CamlTk library;
 if you haven't installed it, compilation will fail.)
make[1]: Entering directory `/h/image/ftp.inria.fr/oc/camltk'
ocamlc -I +camltk -c start.ml
File "start.ml", line 25, characters 0-7:
Unbound module Tk
make[1]: *** [start.cmo] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/h/image/ftp.inria.fr/oc/camltk'
make: [all] Error 2 (ignored)

I'm sure this is some sort of pilot error on my part, but it's 
not getting me to where I want to be.  I tried to modify the makefile
to use labltk instead of camltk, but it failed there with

File "start.ml", line 31, characters 6-27:
Expecting function has type
  ?name:string ->
  ?activebackground:Tk.color ->
  ?activeforeground:Tk.color ->
  ?anchor:Tk.anchor ->
  ?background:Tk.color ->
  ?bitmap:Tk.bitmap ->
  ?borderwidth:int ->
  ?command:(unit -> unit) ->
  ?cursor:Tk.cursor ->
  ?disabledforeground:Tk.color ->
  ?font:string ->
  ?foreground:Tk.color ->
  ?height:int ->
  ?highlightbackground:Tk.color ->
  ?highlightcolor:Tk.color ->
  ?highlightthickness:int ->
  ?image:[< Tk.image] ->
  ?justify:Tk.justification ->
  ?padx:int ->
  ?pady:int ->
  ?relief:Tk.relief ->
  ?state:Tk.state ->
  ?takefocus:bool ->
  ?text:string ->
  ?textvariable:Textvariable.textVariable ->
  ?underline:int ->
  ?width:int -> ?wraplength:int -> Widget.button Widget.widget

I also tried to install camltk separately, but that was an
almighty mess (among other things, the configuration uses
obsolete macros to check for the existence of Cygwin, never
mind total confusion about what tools to use to make libraries,
and what suffixes different sorts of file should have.)

I am doing all this on Windows 2k, with some recent version
of Cygwin, and Scriptics Tcl/tk installed, and ocaml 3.04.
Remember -- I am getting stumped by one of the demos that
is supposed to get people started, and I am normally capable
of installing garbage like Oracle, Apache, mail server
software, and firewalls, all with my bare hands.  Something
that is supposed to be easy and confidence building, isn't.

David Chase


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Re: [Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[Oliver Bandel]

On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Noel Welsh wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm writing a commercial application in O'Caml.
[...]


Dear Audience, lets invest some minutes and sing a song...

  "OH HAPPY DAY, OH HAPPY DAAAY,...."


Ciao,
   Oliver

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Re: [Caml-list] Proselytizing

[Brian Rogoff]

Ouch! I filed a complaint about that very problem with the oc library
camltk example.

David, check out the otherlibs/labltk/example directory of your ocaml
distribution, and that contains roughly the same examples for labltk.

-- Brian

On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, David Chase wrote:

> At 10:06 AM 4/18/2002 -0700, Charles Martin wrote:
> >>Only a few weeks ago I managed to convert some staunch CL-programming
> >>colleague to OCaml (after one year of merciless proselytizing!).
> >...
> >By the way, I scanned the new translated OCaml book and I have to say, it is a very impressive piece of work.  The publication of this and Benjamin Pierce's new book might help OCaml past the inflection point.
>
> Slightly better packaging/checking on the demos would be a good thing.
>
> I am trying, as hard as possible in my non-copious free time,
> to get past my own inflection point, and one sticking point is
> confusion with CamlTk.  I thought it worked -- it's clearly
> "here" enough to run the browser, and I did the load and execute
> game in the scripting window, but when I try the examples, it
> fails to find it:
>
> -- Making all in camltk
> (This program requires the CamlTk library;
>  if you haven't installed it, compilation will fail.)
> make[1]: Entering directory `/h/image/ftp.inria.fr/oc/camltk'
> ocamlc -I +camltk -c start.ml
> File "start.ml", line 25, characters 0-7:
> Unbound module Tk
> make[1]: *** [start.cmo] Error 2
> make[1]: Leaving directory `/h/image/ftp.inria.fr/oc/camltk'
> make: [all] Error 2 (ignored)
>
> I'm sure this is some sort of pilot error on my part, but it's
> not getting me to where I want to be.  I tried to modify the makefile
> to use labltk instead of camltk, but it failed there with
>
> File "start.ml", line 31, characters 6-27:
> Expecting function has type
>   ?name:string ->
>   ?activebackground:Tk.color ->
>   ?activeforeground:Tk.color ->
>   ?anchor:Tk.anchor ->
>   ?background:Tk.color ->
>   ?bitmap:Tk.bitmap ->
>   ?borderwidth:int ->
>   ?command:(unit -> unit) ->
>   ?cursor:Tk.cursor ->
>   ?disabledforeground:Tk.color ->
>   ?font:string ->
>   ?foreground:Tk.color ->
>   ?height:int ->
>   ?highlightbackground:Tk.color ->
>   ?highlightcolor:Tk.color ->
>   ?highlightthickness:int ->
>   ?image:[< Tk.image] ->
>   ?justify:Tk.justification ->
>   ?padx:int ->
>   ?pady:int ->
>   ?relief:Tk.relief ->
>   ?state:Tk.state ->
>   ?takefocus:bool ->
>   ?text:string ->
>   ?textvariable:Textvariable.textVariable ->
>   ?underline:int ->
>   ?width:int -> ?wraplength:int -> Widget.button Widget.widget
>
> I also tried to install camltk separately, but that was an
> almighty mess (among other things, the configuration uses
> obsolete macros to check for the existence of Cygwin, never
> mind total confusion about what tools to use to make libraries,
> and what suffixes different sorts of file should have.)
>
> I am doing all this on Windows 2k, with some recent version
> of Cygwin, and Scriptics Tcl/tk installed, and ocaml 3.04.
> Remember -- I am getting stumped by one of the demos that
> is supposed to get people started, and I am normally capable
> of installing garbage like Oracle, Apache, mail server
> software, and firewalls, all with my bare hands.  Something
> that is supposed to be easy and confidence building, isn't.
>
> David Chase
>
>
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Re: [Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[Xavier Leroy]

> I'm writing a commercial application in O'Caml.  We
> need to run on all the main platforms (Linux, Windows
> and Mac) and we'd like to use the native code compiler
> and threads.
> 
> My first question: does O'Caml support threads in
> compiled code in all the above platforms?

Linux: yes.
Windows: yes.
Mac: not yet by lack of (full) POSIX threads, but it is likely that
  future versions of MacOS X will have it.

> My second question: how do I get threads to work?  I'm
> currently developing on Linux and there is no
> threads.cmxa in my /usr/lib/ocaml (3.04 via Debian). 
> The O'Caml book suggests I need to download and
> compile my own ocamlopt including pthreads support. 
> Is this correct?

Yes.  There is a configuration-time choice between bytecode-only threads
and system threads (pthreads).  Depending on what the author of the
OCaml package chose, you may have to recompile from sources and select
system threads.

> What do I do for Windows?

Nothing!  The Windows port of OCaml uses system (Win32) threads, both
in bytecode and native-code.

Keep us informed with your commercial application.

- Xavier Leroy
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Re: [Caml-list] Proselytizing

[Xavier Leroy]

> I am trying, as hard as possible in my non-copious free time,
> to get past my own inflection point, and one sticking point is
> confusion with CamlTk.  I thought it worked -- it's clearly
> "here" enough to run the browser, and I did the load and execute
> game in the scripting window, but when I try the examples, it
> fails to find it:

I agree the situation is a bit confusing: there are two OCaml GUI
libraries based on Tk.  One (Labltk) is part of the standard
distribution, and used by the interface browser.  The other (Camltk)
is distributed separately and used in the demo that didn't compile.

> I'm sure this is some sort of pilot error on my part, but it's 
> not getting me to where I want to be.  I tried to modify the makefile
> to use labltk instead of camltk, but it failed there with

Sorry for the scary error message, but it just says that Camltk and
Labltk have different interfaces!

> I also tried to install camltk separately, but that was an
> almighty mess (among other things, the configuration uses
> obsolete macros to check for the existence of Cygwin, never
> mind total confusion about what tools to use to make libraries,
> and what suffixes different sorts of file should have.)
> I am doing all this on Windows 2k, with some recent version
> of Cygwin

Camltk is (for the time being) Unix-only.  Although Cygwin does heroic
efforts to emulate Unix, it's not quite Unix and I'm not surprised
that Camltk doesn't compile right out of the box under Cygwin.

This mess should be cleaned up in the future, as there is an effort in
progress to merge Labltk and Camltk, and install both in the standard
distribution.  In the meantime, I agree a Labltk version of the
examples is in order.

> Remember -- I am getting stumped by one of the demos that
> is supposed to get people started, and I am normally capable
> of installing garbage like Oracle, Apache, mail server
> software, and firewalls, all with my bare hands.

I don't doubt that, but my experience (as a long-time Unix user who
installed quite a bit of garbage of the kind you mention) is that
installing Unix software on Windows machines, even with Cygwin, is
often surprisingly hard.

- Xavier Leroy
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Re: [Caml-list] Proselytizing

[David Chase]

At 09:58 AM 4/19/2002 +0200, Xavier Leroy wrote:
>I don't doubt that, but my experience (as a long-time Unix user who
>installed quite a bit of garbage of the kind you mention) is that
>installing Unix software on Windows machines, even with Cygwin, is
>often surprisingly hard.

True, though Cygwin has improved astonishingly over the last five
years.  One problem with the "new" Cygwin is that it comes in many,
many pieces, so when someone says "Cygwin" you cannot now be sure
what exactly they have installed.

However, back to the subject.  For proselytizing purposes,
you want to avoid bad surprises for new users.  In this case,
I think that means that you should remove any Unix-only demos
from the introductory examples, and put them someplace with a
clear label that says "Unix only".  Unless the benefits from 
impressing the Unix users outweigh the negatives of confusing
the Windows users, such demos should go.

The other reason to avoid Unix-only demos is that, if you wish
to make ocaml more likely to be accepted by new users, then it
doesn't hurt to be "cross platform", which means that support for
Windows is about as good as support for Unix (which ought to
now include MacOS X).  Not only should this be true, it should
also be easy to see this truth from the outside.  This is purely
for marketing purposes, understand, but I am much more likely
to want to write something new in OCaml if I think I'll be able
to run it on any box I am likely to use (meaning, Windows, Linux,
and MacOS).

David

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Re: [Caml-list] Proselytizing

[Sven]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 09:58:44AM +0200, Xavier Leroy wrote:
> > I also tried to install camltk separately, but that was an
> > almighty mess (among other things, the configuration uses
> > obsolete macros to check for the existence of Cygwin, never
> > mind total confusion about what tools to use to make libraries,
> > and what suffixes different sorts of file should have.)
> > I am doing all this on Windows 2k, with some recent version
> > of Cygwin
> 
> Camltk is (for the time being) Unix-only.  Although Cygwin does heroic
> efforts to emulate Unix, it's not quite Unix and I'm not surprised
> that Camltk doesn't compile right out of the box under Cygwin.

So no ActiveDvi for windows, isn't it ? That it until the next release of
ocaml at least.

> I don't doubt that, but my experience (as a long-time Unix user who
> installed quite a bit of garbage of the kind you mention) is that
> installing Unix software on Windows machines, even with Cygwin, is
> often surprisingly hard.

Ok, i will stop trying to build camltk and advi on a windows box then, and use
my time more positively.

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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Re: [Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[John Max Skaller]

If you're using threads with sockets, you might want to do what I did:
I took the library routine that launches a process on a connect
[establish_server .. seems to be defunct now ..]
and replaced enough code to make it launch a thread instead.
I used the John Reppy style channels from the Threads library Event
module for communication.

My application was designed
to provide an simulation of a telephone system.

Getting the logic and timing right was very tricky --
coding it in Ocaml was very easy, those Reppy channel things
are magic. The hardest part was managing termination ..

[I'd never written a serious multithreaded app before ..
Stevens + Ocaml makes a fine team :-]

BTW: if you're looking at mobile agents .. JoCaml
is worth examining... in fact, its worth examining
even if you're not :-)

-- 
John Max Skaller, mailto:skaller@ozemail.com.au
snail:10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia.
voice:61-2-9660-0850




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[Caml-list] CamlTk/Windows

[Christophe Macabiau]

Xavier Leroy wrote:

> Camltk is (for the time being) Unix-only.  Although Cygwin does heroic
> efforts to emulate Unix, it's not quite Unix and I'm not surprised
> that Camltk doesn't compile right out of the box under Cygwin.

CamlTk compiles under Windows !

You can have a look at SynDEx, which is written using CamlTk :
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/syndex/

It's true that it's a little difficult to compile with Cygwin, various reasons :
* you don't have the good version of Cygwin; I use the version 1.1.8-2 (one day I
tried another version unsucessfully)
* maybe you have a problem with the configure script; in this case you must
report to Pierre Weis and Jun Furuse who maintain CamlTk.

SynDEx is written with CamlTk, but no depends on cygwin.dll. Dmitry Bely and
Masakazu Fukuzawa made a patch of OCaml-3.03 to compile OCaml with mingw
(http://www.mingw.org/ ) which allows to compile under windows without to rely on
3rd party DLL; instead of using cygwin.dll, it use Microsoft's standard C runtime
library MSVCRT.DLL. We adapted this patch to the version 3.04 of OCaml. That's
what I use to compile SynDEx.

We have discussed with the Ocaml team to include this patch in the next version
of Ocaml, to be able to compile with mingw; I don't know if they took a
decision... Maybe it would be useful to distribute this patch on the Camltk web ?

It would be great for Ocaml users who work under Windows (it's not a shame) to be
allowed to use Camltk (it's a joke...)

Regards

Christophe Macabiau

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Re: [Caml-list] Using threads in compiled code

[Noel Welsh]

My thanks to everyone who responded to my question.  I
looks like O'Caml has the level of support we desire. 
As soon as I get time to recompile my O'Caml
installation I'll see how I get on with pthreads.

Noel

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