Re: [Caml-list] Metaprogramming features

[Jon Harrop <jonathandeanharrop@googlemail.com>]

On Saturday 04 October 2008 14:57:16 Richard Jones wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 04, 2008 at 03:31:18PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > I asked if it would be worth doing so before I even attempted it and was
> > told that it would not be worth attempting by Pierre Weis. Xavier Leroy
> > told me that copyright issues in French law essentially prohibit
> > contributions from non-French programmers.
>
> I'm collaborating at the moment with a couple of French programmers on
> a [non-OCaml] FSF project, so this seems unlikely to me (and yes, both
> the FSF and Red Hat provide lawyers to check this sort of thing out).

Did you transfer copyrights?

> > > Where did you nurse the patch through many iterations,
> > > as the language designers asked you to fix one thing and another,
> > > before the final patch was rejected?
> >
> > I would like to think that the OCaml community has try..finally pinned
> > down now. It is the first example on every Camlp4 tutorial after all...
>
> Std.finally in extlib?

Sure, many of OCaml's standard libraries contains a reimplementation.

> I've used it precisely twice, ever, so I'm not convinced that try/finally is
> the one thing missing from OCaml that would propel it to mass adoption.

Indeed, OCaml has many such issues that the community could easily fix and 
that would help adoption.

> > I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with having a language
> > implementation written by language researchers for language research but
> > almost all users would benefit enormously from a variety of simple
> > improvements that the community could easily implement themselves were it
> > feasible to get changes absorbed upstream more quickly. Now that OCaml is
> > gaining traction in industry there are also a growing number of people
> > willing to throw money around to get improvements made and we could all
> > be benefitting from that.
>
> You still don't get the whole open source thing though.  You need to
> make the patches yourself, or get FF Consultancy to pay someone to
> develop them.  Deep compiler changes don't just happen because someone
> demands them.  Whether we're talking about INRIA's busy researchers or
> volunteers maintaining Perl & Ruby in their spare time, they don't
> have time to just implement stuff because people shout loudly.
> Instead they review patches submitted through the standard bug
> tracking system.
>
> Despite your claims, there are lots of features currently being
> tracked through mantis.  I've submitted a couple of minor ones myself,
> both of which will appear in 3.11.  But I didn't just demand they
> happen - for both of them I submitted patches, listened to feedback,
> modified things ...
>
>   http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/
>   http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/how-to-supply-code-to-open-source-projects/
>
> So here's an idea:
>
> (1) Start a project to list all the things you think are missing from
> the compiler or language.  I'd join this project, because I've got a
> few things of my own.
>
> (2) Enumerate them on a wiki or editable web page somewhere, ask
> others to join, argue about the features you think are priorities.
>
> (3) WRITE PATCHES to implement them in the CVS version of the OCaml
> compiler (or library, or wherever they need to be implemented).
>
> (4) Submit the patches, and detailed rationales for the changes,
> through the bugtracker.
>
> (5) Listen to feedback, modify your patches as appropriate.  Some will
> get rejected, some accepted straightaway, most will need to go through
> many iterations.
>
> When you've done all the above, in about a year I would say, and
> nothing has been accepted, then you will be in a position to make wild
> claims about OCaml upstream being too slow for your liking.

I submitted the following trivial fix over a year ago:

  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=4338

It was completely reimplemented by Xavier (thus avoiding copyright issues) and 
will be available in 3.11 well over a year after I fixed the problem.

In fact, I'm not sure there would have been any point in creating a patch 
rather than posting code given that the code gets reimplemented anyway.

I believe we can improve upon having Xavier reimplement trivial fixes himself 
and users having to wait for a year before they can benefit from such fixes.

> And you can fork the project to make FlyingCaml++ the way you want it (ain't
> open source great like that? -- try forking F# some time and find out how
> hard the lawyers come down on you). 

That will not help merge parts of MetaOCaml (which is already a fork of OCaml) 
into upstream OCaml.

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e