Re: [Caml-list] Interactive technical computing

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 03:26:03PM -0600, Robert Fischer wrote:
> > Putting aside the obvious cultural resistance to using a sensible
> > language for this project, there is one technical hurdle: It needs to
> > compile into a DLL which can be linked to other programs (in C and
> > other languages).  I can't generate such code using ocamlopt, at least
> > not without using unsupported out-of-tree extensions.
> >
> I don't think this is a real hurdle to general adoption of a language.
> After all, Java and C# aren't intended to be used like that, yet they
> certainly have wide-spread adoption.

It is a hurdle because not all programming is writing end-user
application code.

In fact what is somewhat sad is that OCaml (unlike Java and C#) can
compile to native code which really has very minimal "environmental
needs" - just a smallish library of functions and a GC which is
written on top of C's malloc.  So really it could be an ideal
replacement for libraries written in C, where the heavy lifting is
done in OCaml and there are some thin bindings to provide a C API.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat