Re: Portability of applications written in OCAML

[skaller <skaller@maxtal.com.au>]

Claude Marche wrote:
> Pour résumer mon propos, voici donc les questions que je me pose :
[]
> another application doing the same thing but easier to install.

 
> If this is technically feasible, I would like to know people who are
> interested in using this for distribution of their own application in
> bytecode form. 

> Any comments, remarks and suggestions will be welcome. My goal is be
> able to distribute as widely as possible an application written in
> Ocaml, avoiding remarks like ``I'm interested in this application but
> I cannot compile Ocaml sources, and you do not offer a suitable binary
> for my configuration », and I would be glad to hear any suggestion for
> achieving this goal.

I believe one fundamental obstacle to configuring ocaml is the lack of
dynamic loading.
Ideally, it should be possible for ocamlopt to build 'extensions' to the
bytecode
interpreter, efficively doing '-custom' linkage at load time.

The reason this is necessary is that if you have multiple ocaml
applications,
you may not want a special 'run time' for each one: each application
might
use the core, and a single separate extension module. 

I have no idea how to implement this. However, one of the things that
you can do -- albiet clumbsily -- in python, is generate C code,
run the compiler, and then load the resulting shared library as a python
extension module.

-- 
John (Max) Skaller, mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au
10/1 Toxteth Rd Glebe NSW 2037 Australia voice: 61-2-9660-0850
homepage: http://www.maxtal.com.au/~skaller
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