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 mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by sympa.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTPS id C10477ED26 for ; Wed, 30 May 2012 14:42:06 +0200 (CEST) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: ApsBAFYVxk/B/BfVkWdsb2JhbABEgx2tH4NzAQEBAQkLCwcUAySCFwEBBTg4CAEQCw4KCQwKDwkDAgECAUUGDQEHAQEXh3S5MYsFgiCDIgOVGIVPjQY X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.75,683,1330902000"; d="scan'208";a="160574696" Received: from msa04.smtpout.orange.fr (HELO msa.smtpout.orange.fr) ([193.252.23.213]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 30 May 2012 14:41:59 +0200 Received: from [192.168.1.105] ([86.195.7.207]) by mwinf5d30 with ME id GChy1j0284U0XEW03ChyTV; Wed, 30 May 2012 14:41:58 +0200 Message-ID: <4FC61595.6070009@frisch.fr> Date: Wed, 30 May 2012 14:41:57 +0200 From: Alain Frisch User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686 on x86_64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120428 Thunderbird/12.0.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Hongbo Zhang CC: caml-list@inria.fr References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Re: Syntax extensions without Camlp4 On 05/27/2012 06:53 PM, Hongbo Zhang wrote: > Well, I don't think it's good to downplay camlp4. The problem is we need > more documentation and more tests. (The new) Camlp4 has been here for several years. Documentation and tests are still lagging behind. Nevertheless, it burns a non-negligible fraction of the total resource spent by maintainers on OCaml (fixing bugs, struggling with camlp4 to take new language features into account). In addition, there is a growing consensus that the most common uses of camlp4 (such as code generation driven by type declaration) might be based on a much simpler approach, and this would actually have advantages for the end-users (like not changing the concrete syntax) and for developers (much less information to grasp in order to write such an extension). Coq is one of the few examples of a big project that relies on other aspects of camlp4 (e.g. its parsing framework with extensible grammars). As far as I know, it also still works with camlp5, which is actively maintained, and I don't believe the Coq guys enjoy so much maintaining support for both camlp4 and campl5. All that considered, and this is only a personal opinion: I don't see compelling arguments to continue investing efforts in camlp4 itself (at least, for the core OCaml team) and I believe it is a good time to start considering a (medium-term) future of OCaml without camlp4. Of course, alternative solutions need to be developed and streamlined before killing camlp4 is even considered. Alain