From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pBLNt1KO023735 for ; Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:55:01 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: Av0EAE9x8k5QRFuw/2dsb2JhbABDrCOBBYFyAQEDAQE6PxALGBwSFCg0h3oCBrdWhRWDYII3YwSUfpI0 X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,390,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="136397959" Received: from furbychan.cocan.org ([80.68.91.176]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/AES256-SHA; 22 Dec 2011 00:54:55 +0100 Received: from rich by furbychan.cocan.org with local (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1RdVzr-0005aJ-7q; Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:54:55 +0000 Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:54:55 +0000 From: "Richard W.M. Jones" To: achrist@easystreet.net Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Message-ID: <20111221235455.GA21379@annexia.org> References: <20111221232859.GA21209@annexia.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20111221232859.GA21209@annexia.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Questions about OCaml and google native client On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 11:28:59PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 07:45:21AM +0100, achrist@easystreet.net wrote: > > I have just been reading about google native client, and it seems > > like it may be a fun platform for which to write something. OCaml > > looks like the best language on there so far. Questions about it: I guess I'll answer the questions, by looking at the code itself ... > > 1. How alive is the project of supporting OCaml on google NACL? Not very alive, by the looks of it. However ... > > The version of OCaml supported there is 3.11 from what I could > > find, several months behind current release. Anyone know if and > > when this will get brought up to date? ... the patch to ocamlopt is really small. Possibly even a candidate for going upstream. So updating it to the latest OCaml 3.12 ought to be very simple. The current patch only implements the changes for i386. For OCaml in particular since 64 bit is so useful, it'd be nice to have an equivalent patch for the x86-64 backend. That's also probably not hard, although the sandboxing techniques for i386 and x86-64 used by NaCL are reportedly quite different. > > 2. Are there any particularly good OCaml programs now available > > that run in google NACL? Any nice ones available from the google > > app store? No idea ... > > 3. Any other thoughts about the viability of this combination? NaCL is a fantastic concept actually. It's a bit of a shame that other browser vendors seem to be steering clear, although there does seem to be a plugin. So having an OCaml backend (and other functional languages) is a thoroughly good thing IMHO. It could finally offer a clean break from Javascript / targeting Javascript, while allowing web programs to run at full speed and be written in reasonable languages. A possible downside is current lack of portability to non-x86 & non-ARM platforms. (NaCL supports i386, x86-64 and ARM only). Here's an introduction to how NaCL works: http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/34913.pdf Rich. -- Richard Jones Red Hat