Re: [Caml-list] ANN: Brand-new BER MetaOCaml for OCaml 4.00.1

[rixed@happyleptic.org]

Once disabled Tk (--no-tk) everything compiled and installed as documented.
Thank you.

I understand that this is very interesting from a research perspective, but
practically meta-programming is only useful as long as performances are the
concern, for these problems when some critical information is not known until
runtime; I can't think of another usage for runtime code specialisation anyway.

So the question that immediately arises is then: why is metaocaml supporting
byte code only? Is a metaocamlopt planned, envisaged, doable, in a galaxy
not too far away?


For the record, I encounter a surprising lot number of occasions, both in pet
projects and at work, where meta-programming is a fruitful approach.  Probably
it's such a technique that once you used it once you suddenly discover how hard
you missed it until then. If so then it could be a killer feature for OCaml.

Only recently I've used it from scheme to specialize scheme, from scheme to
specialize C, from python to specialize C, from C to specialize C, from OCaml
to specialize assembly and from OCaml to specialize OCaml (yes, with Printf and
Dynlink). The only 'natural' language for doing such things is of course
Lisp/Scheme, but even in Lisp you don't have many guaranties that the generated
code is safe - you just know that your code fragment is a valid s-expression;
not much that what you got from the printf+compile+dlopen approach). MetaOCaml
looks so much more interesting from a practical point of view!