Re: [Caml-list] Distributed computing libraries

[Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto@dicosmo.org>]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 12:53:07PM -0400, Thomas Braibant wrote:
<snip>
> Maybe it would be interesting for the community if someone could sum
> up the pros and cons of each of this "libraries", and maybe give some
> information about their status (still in development, mature, etc)?
> 
> With best regards,
> Thomas Braibant

Quite a good point, and it really goes beyond just the bunch of
(very useful) libraries that try to speed-up computations by
leveraging multicore/multiprocessors/clusters etc.

I think OCaml is a wonderful language, and it has the potential
to attract much more users if we can make it easy to find, build,
install, compare and assess the various libraries, packages
and tools that are available.

If I can dream with my eyes open (which is a decent way of
spending time while waiting for a plane in the middle
of Nebraska, after all :-)), I could imagine:

 (1) a central repository for OCaml projects where
   packages are uploaded, with their different versions, tagged,
   and classified, with pointers to the current, active development
   platform (github, gitorious, sourceforge, whatever) (Oasis DB?)

 (2) a continuous integration server testing buildability of the
   different versions of the packages, with different versions
   of the compiler, and on all available architectures, reporting
   errors in a meaningful way to their authors, and providing 
   extremely valuable information to users that will know 
   beforehand what works and what does not work on which
   configuration, instead of discovering this the hard way
   (Debian OCamlers lurking here surely know what is the source
    of inspiration of this part of my dream; and yes, Debian does
    all this for the Debian OCaml packages, but we need to cater
    to *all* users :-))

 (3) an organised OCamlPedia site where, for each 'class' of 
   problem (parallelism, parsing, graph algorithms, numerical
   computation, code transformation, you name it) developers and users
   can contribute to maintain up-to-date summaries, comparisons,
   test results, code snippets, pointers to scientific papers
   and the like...
   And for each "feature" of the language, I'd love to see tutorials,
   code examples, pointers to the relevant literature, and to
   packages showing them off.

To get there, we need to make our collaborative hidden side shine,
and complete the effort started by some of us to organise the community...
maybe this will happen during the coffee break at the next OCaml meeting.

Ok, time to stop dreaming, to go back to reality, and to catch that flight

--Roberto

P.S.: hey, I just checked, and ocamlpedia.* is available,
so I registered ocamlpedia.org, and I'll be more than happy
to offer it to whomever will run the site, if it happens :-)