Re: [Caml-list] adding a scripting language to an ocaml program

[Thomas Fischbacher <t.fischbacher@soton.ac.uk>]

Mehdi Dogguy wrote:

>> We (the nmag/nsim dev team - http://nmag.soton.ac.uk) kind-of had the 
>> opposite problem, i.e. we had to extend a scripting language that is 
>> easy to learn with something that has a bit more steam. We decided to 
>> use Python+OCaml. There's a semi-abandoned debian package, pycaml, that
>> does this, but that's broken - it has memory management bugs both oh
>> the Python and OCaml side.
> 
> uh… did you try to submit patches or report bugs against the package?

Yes. We did have some discussion about these things with the debian
ocaml maintainers quite a long time ago - but somehow our fixes never
were incorporated into the package.

Part of the problem is that the original pycaml package is fairly
awkward code no one is too proud of. But still, it works (at least
our fixed and extended version does), and it actually is quite useful.

The last thing I remember is that Guillaume had contacted me about
wanting to re-write it, but not much seems to have happened on that
front so far. I'd strongly suggest we just stick our heads together
and get our code into the debian package so that at least the serious
memory corruption problems are fixed. People might not exactly have
much fun starting to use it only to experience rude mm-related
surprises.

I think our pycaml patches were first mentioned here:

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2007/11/7a1c5726ab3d6661c233a7245fc6cca8.en.html

> pycaml is known to be dead upstream. We¹ do our best to keep it in a good
> shape. But, we don't receive bugreports against pycaml and is used
> by only one package… that makes bug fixing not easy :)
> 
>> Here is a fixed version that also supports a few nice extensions:
>>
>> http://nmag.soton.ac.uk/tf/pycaml/
>>
> 
> Is this released/linked/advertised somewhere? (other than this mail).
> It would be nice to have your fixes packages so that others can benefit
> from your work.

Replacing the code in the debian package with ours is quite
straightforward.

-- 
best regards,
Thomas Fischbacher
t.fischbacher@soton.ac.uk