From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Original-To: caml-list@sympa.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@sympa.inria.fr Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by sympa.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTPS id A097F7ED26 for ; Wed, 6 Jun 2012 22:20:24 +0200 (CEST) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AvMBAHe6z0/RVaG2imdsb2JhbABFtC4IIgEBAQoJDQcSBiOCGQEBBBICJgYBOAEDDAEFBUYUIAEFAQEhJw6HWwMLmhQJA48ShRknDYlIAQUMCIsEhTlgA5Ucjh4+gVSCLQ X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.75,725,1330902000"; d="scan'208";a="146818626" Received: from mail-gg0-f182.google.com ([209.85.161.182]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/RC4-MD5; 06 Jun 2012 22:20:23 +0200 Received: by ggnm2 with SMTP id m2so8083062ggn.27 for ; Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:20:22 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20120113; h=sender:date:from:to:cc:subject:message-id:references:mime-version :content-type:content-disposition:in-reply-to:user-agent; bh=Gi8NB6yhipIqXlDsv973z+rkG3QqG/Z6tY8yEK8qf4Y=; b=zZgOYdselXbRmlOBpj1ofYdgNIU8zDvrpsut47qjSRKy+kA13O+OpaoHIPvtGxif4w 7JcyO79ooTNlLkOG+7MEqCG/hU+GQIjxYTzyPrv2N4DKpl54RqZSjy7Tcq7w4GDBQlvG slb3tYLKIzTM+U4vFo4XVvdZ+M0jV6HivqLjjQ523NRut3D5Yr0FdZf7qTUho+GRKL26 6hWk/grZjKGFL2xUhPmWWS3+mHo1LT2Wb6Lx5FdUmr3mpheimU08/SJ+SIy/QELUqJSG HOU2EKhurB1x5FszWwXcEemE2gAwU9cHicMhSbots5DOx0IROv9kp1koIE6twMjBW7ZU lrMQ== Received: by 10.43.106.147 with SMTP id du19mr15102454icc.56.1339014022652; Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:20:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from voyager ([173.209.24.182]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id v17sm1012304igv.7.2012.06.06.13.20.20 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:20:21 -0700 (PDT) Sender: Roberto Di Cosmo Received: from dicosmo by voyager with local (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1ScMlu-0005B1-Og; Wed, 06 Jun 2012 22:24:02 +0200 Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2012 22:24:02 +0200 From: Roberto Di Cosmo To: Thomas Braibant Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Message-ID: <20120606202402.GA19265@voyager> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Distributed computing libraries On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 12:53:07PM -0400, Thomas Braibant wrote: > 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 :-)