[Caml-list] 20th anniversary

[Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>]

Twenty years ago to this day, on Sept 12th 1995, the mail below announced
the availability of Caml Special Light 1.06.  This was the first public
release of the programming language and system that was to become Objective
Caml, then OCaml.

All the Caml Special Light language design is still there today in OCaml;
likewise, parts of the implementation are clearly recognizable in the latest
OCaml sources.  However, in 20 years, the language picked up many language
features that were open research problems in 1995, such as objects and
classes with type inference, polymorphic variants, first-class polymorphism,
and first-class modules.  Likewise, the implementation, initially targeted
to Unix workstations, is now running on an amazing variety of platforms,
from $35 Raspberry Pi to mainframes with 1 TB of RAM to cloud distributed
systems.

The most spectacular evolution of those 20 years is certainly the growth of
the user's community and programming ecosystem.  Many application areas of
OCaml were not expected, such as financial applications and systems
programming; others, such as Web programming and bioinformatics, did not
even exist in 1995.  Likewise, the amount of freely available libraries,
programming tools, programming environments, teaching material, and
infrastructure (OPAM & the Platform) is well beyond my wildest dreams of the
time.  A big "thank you" to the great many people who contributed to this
success!

Far from slowing down, OCaml's development has been picking up momentum
recently.  The next 20 years of OCaml will be exciting indeed!

- Xavier Leroy, on behalf of the core Caml development team


From: Xavier Leroy <xleroy@pauillac.inria.fr>
Message-Id: <199509120927.LAA00417@pauillac.inria.fr>
Subject: Release 1.06 of Caml Special Light
To: caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 1995 11:27:13 +0200 (MET DST)

Announcing Caml Special Light 1.06, the first public release of the
Caml Special Light system.

Caml Special Light is a complete reimplementation of Caml Light that
adds a powerful module system in the style of Standard ML. The module
system is based on the notion of manifest types / translucent sums; it
supports Modula-style separate compilation, and fully transparent
higher-order functors (see the papers in the POPL 94 and 95
proceedings).

Caml Special Light comprises two compilers: a bytecode compiler in the
style of Caml Light (but up to twice as fast), and a high-performance
native code compiler for the following platforms:

        Alpha processors: DecStation 3000 under OSF1
        Sparc processors: Sun Sparcstation under SunOS 4.1 or Solaris 2
        Intel 386 / 486 / Pentium processors: PCs under Linux
        Mips processors: DecStation 3100 and 5000 under Ultrix 4

The native-code compiler delivers excellent performance (better than
Standard ML of New Jersey 1.08 on our tests), while retaining the
moderate memory requirements of the bytecode compiler.

Caml Special Light is still in the experimental state: the base
language has changed and will change again in significant ways,
source-level compatibility is not ensured, the implementation is
alpha-release quality, and many Caml Light tools and libraries have
not yet been ported to Caml Special Light. The present release is
targeted towards testers, adventurous souls, and users with strong
interest in modules and high-performance compilation; other users are
encouraged to stay with Caml Light 0.7 for a while.

The source distribution (for Unix machines only) is available by
anonymous FTP on ftp.inria.fr, directory lang/caml-light.

More information on Caml Special Light is available on the World Wide
Web, at http://pauillac.inria.fr/csl/.

Bug reports and technical questions should be directed to
caml-light@pauillac.inria.fr. For general questions and comments,
use the Caml mailing list caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr (to subscribe:
caml-list-request@pauillac.inria.fr).

- Xavier Leroy

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% Caml Special Light                  "Taste Caml in a whole new Light" %
% caml-light@pauillac.inria.fr                                          %
% Projet Cristal, INRIA, B.P.105, 78153 Le Chesnay, France.             %
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