Google summer of Code proposal

[Andrey Riabushenko <cdome@bk.ru>]

Hi OCaml hackers,

It is not mistake, in spite of ocaml does not take part in GSoC 2009, but 
ocaml community still can benefit from it.

I would like to develop LLVM frontend to Ocaml language. LLVM  does 
participate in GSoC. LLVM do not mind to developed a ocaml frontend as LLVM 
GSoC project. I want to discuss details with you before I will make an 
official proposal to LLVM.

1.What is the best way to make ocaml frontend on your opinion?

I think the best would to way to develop ocaml llvm front end as a part of 
ocaml distribution. I don't not want to develop yet another a separate 
project, which is half-done llvm frontend that nobody uses. There are plenty 
of those for other languages lying around. I propose to forget about JIT 
capabilities of LLVM and concentrate on AOT compilation for now.

Ocamlopt currently generates native assembler for the following platforms:
i386, AMD64, ia64, arm, hppa, alpha, m68k, mips, powerpc, sparc assembler.
I propose to add LLVM assembler generation as another platform to ocamlopt. It 
requires the least modification of ocaml source and easy to maintain. LLVM 
will give ocaml an aggressive whole program optimizer and will make possible 
to run ocaml on new platforms that are supported by LLVM, but not yet by 
Ocaml.


Question to the Ocaml creators and maintainers.
2. Will you merge LLVM platform to the ocaml trunk assuming that it works as 
it should?



Andrey Riabushenko
PhD student,
Faculty of applied mathematics
National technical university of Ukraine "KPI" 
http://kpi.ua/en/