Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] TypeRex release 1.0.0 candidate 1

[Tiphaine Turpin <tiphaine.turpin@free.fr>]

On 06/03/2012 13:02, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> [...]
> At the same time, I'm not thrilled at the idea of having to use a
> different ocamlc just to benefit from TypeRex. Having to do so brings a
> number of disadvantages, the first and foremost being that now the
> programmer needs to worry about having synchronized versions of the
> "legacy" ocamlc installed on his machine and the version shipped by
> TypeRex.
First, a small precision (which may not be obvious from TypeRex 
documentation): as the ocp-ocamlc, ... commands are only wrappers, they 
are not tied to a particular version of the actual compilers they call. 
In fact the following three components are somehow independent:
- the installed OCaml compilers (currently only 3.12.* is supported, 
because by mistake we forgot to include 3.11 compatibility, will be 
fixed in 1.0.0)
- TypeRex (with ocp-type and ocp-ocamlc, etc.)
- the OCaml compiler used to compile TypeRex (since rc2, >=3.11 works)
However, TypeRex won't be able to handle new language constructs that 
are introduced in OCaml after we extract its front-end, which implies that:
- we will have too follow closely the language evolutions and we will 
release a new version of TypeRex for each major release of OCaml.
- using Typerex for developping the OCaml compiler prevents you to use 
the new language constructs that you introduce, until TypeRex is itself 
updated.
>   But there are more disadvantages, unfortunately.
>
> Can you tell us why we can't (or maybe *when* we will be able to :-))
> have the nice features offered by TypeRex on top of the stock ocamlc
> compiler?
We would like to have the binary annotation feature included in the next 
release of OCaml. Before proposing a patch upstream, we wanted to 
stabilize the changes in the compiler and prove them to be generic 
enough. But there are two alternatives to having binary annotations in 
OCaml:
- improve the ease of use of the wrappers (there have been interesting 
suggestions in this direction on the issue tracker)
- integrate with a build system (which would also replace the ad-hoc 
.typerex file)

Tiphaine