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

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Monday 17 November 2008 16:20:50 Benjamin Canou wrote:
>   Hi,
>
> O'Browser is an implementation of the OCaml virtual machine in
> JavaScript, designed to run in web browsers.
> It features a runtime library compatible with OCaml's standard one
> (including OOP and concurrent threads) and bindings of some JavaScript
> functions to manipulate the DOM primitives.
>
> The distribution is available at [1] and an online version of the
> tutorial is reachable at [2].
>
> Please note that this is an early version, in particular the DOM
> interface module is neither pretty nor well typed.
> However, it can already be used to create little applets or scripts (as
> in the tutorial [2], the examples of the distribution [3] or my webpage
> [4]) and we'll be glad to receive your comments or bug reports.

This is a really awesome project! Performance is fine on a decent browser. 
Times taken to highlight syntax_common.ml on this machine:

Chrome:     0.5s
Firefox:    1.1s
IE7:        5.7s
Konqueror: 17.5s

Looks like you've got an OCaml bytecode interpreter written in Javascript. 
Could you write a compiler and call eval to get better performance?

I've been thinking about run-time generating code using LLVM that runs in 
OCaml's VM recently. Using that to implement Javascript on top of OCaml's VM 
would be interesting...

Anyway, I think that's a really great piece of work!

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