By the way, I checked with someone who knows Poly/ML, and it turns out that

the new mechanism can still be used to get save/restore of sessions just by nominating

the Poly/ML toplevel as the function to export as a binary. So although the mechanism

has changed, the basic support for saving and restoring sessions has not vanished.

I would very much like to see some such facility in OCaml. How hard is it? I vaguely

remember some apparent problem with closures being allocated on the stack, but I

don’t recall the details.

John.

---

From: caml-list-bounces@yquem.inria.fr [mailto:caml-list-bounces@yquem.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Yaron Minsky
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 4:52 PM
To: Jon Harrop
Cc: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Saving the OCaml interpreter state

You should check with someone who knows better, but I suspect that if you become a member of the OCaml consortium (which is fairly cheap) you would have the rights to do what you propose.

y

On 4/12/07, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:

On Thursday 12 April 2007 16:53, Harrison, John R wrote:
> | A new version of Poly ML also doesn't have the persistent storage
>
> system.
>
> Thanks; I didn't know that, and it comes as quite a surprise given
> Poly's history.
>
> Still, my question about OCaml stands. More specifically, I want to
> know whether the facility to save and restore state doesn't exist
> because
>
>  * None of the main OCaml developers particularly care about it
>
> or
>
>  * There are non-trivial technical problems implementing it.

Like Michael, I am also not going to answer your question (sorry!) but can I
just say that, as a commercial developer, there would be significant
incentive to write a killer IDE for OCaml if the current top-level was free
for commercial use, e.g. part of the stdlib.

Having been playing with F# recently, I'm starting to appreciate some of the
features afforded by a decent IDE. However, both OCaml and F# lack features
found in the other and, more importantly, lack many features that could be
hugely beneficial, particularly to users of the interactive systems.

Marshalling top-level state is one such feature.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists

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