Yes, I agree it's useful , and that's why I wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code in syntactic meta-programming (camlp4, fan, ppx) But in the end of day, the conclusion is the cost is just so huge that it should not be widely used, at least , it should not be *leaked* to end users. ( I remember I had a conversation with the original maintainer of camlp4, Nicolas, about 5 years ago, he had similar ideas with me) ----- Original Message ----- From: Serge Sivkov To: caml-list@inria.fr At: 22-Apr-2017 08:49:40 Hence, my two cents: PPX has problems in cross-compilation use cases, but I suppose something like new tag in META can reslove this issue. As for me, just ppx_deriving* by whitequark is yet one example of usefullness of PPX. WBR, ssp 2017-04-22 5:10 GMT+06:00 Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias : "Hongbo Zhang (BLOOMBERG/ 731 LEX)" writes: > Yes, that's exactly what I suggested in the beginning! Maybe I interpret the word "harmful" differently, but IMVHO I have to strongly disagree with your choice of subject in the original mail. Not only PPX has not been harmful for me, but it has been a life-saver tool that has enabled significant progress towards more productive research. "Hongbo Zhang (BLOOMBERG/ 731 LEX)" writes: > calling it 'madness' is disrespectful Personally, I fully subscribe Yaron's message and I see nothing disrespectful in suggesting that abandoning syntactic abstractions is a very bad idea. You wrote: "the OCaml library developer should avoid PPX as much as you can", but if you meant: "PPX seems quite unstable these days, I wonder how could we improve long-term stability?" I'd have to admit that message didn't reach to me. Best regards! Emilio -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs