Re: JIT-compilation for OCaml?

["Joseph R. Kiniry" <kiniry@acm.org>]

Hello Markus,

--On Wednesday, January 03, 2001 19:19:03 +0100 Markus Mottl 
<mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> wrote:

> On Wed, 03 Jan 2001, Joseph R. Kiniry wrote:
>> > No, I don't use it at all, but I believe you that it must be very
>> > painful ;)
>>
>> Not to go offtopic, but I'd rather see list members educated rather than
>> FUD'ded.  If ML is a Prius we still have to respect the Taurus that is
>> Java.
>
> There was a smiley after my criticism... - anyway, though I'd never want
> to switch to Java when I can use OCaml, it isn't this bad compared to
> other mainstream languages. At least some major insanities have been
> removed.

Sorry, I'm seriously emoticon disabled.  I agree with your sentiment.  Some 
of the final insantities are being addressed by pretty bright people, 
(thread semantics, lack of assertions, parameterization), so let's hope 
they get it right.

>> In fact, one of my companies chose Java over five competitor languages
>> (Objective-C, C++, Eiffel, CLOS, and oTcl) in a head-to-head test.  Note
>> that this company is a group of uber-geeks with a language geek at the
>> helm  (me), so we were not working in a vacuum.
>
> Why didn't you compare to OCaml or other FPLs (e.g. Haskell, Clean, etc.)?
> Business reasons?

Entirely.  I would have been happy to work in OCaml, but trying to convince 
investors (who are reluctant enough to go with something like Objective-C 
or CLOS) that ML is a viable option is a hard-sell.  Couple that with the 
whole training, hiring, maintenence, and Open Source issues and you hit a 
dead end immediately.

>> Certainly the breadth and growth of Java's libraries is a marvel, but I
>> *certainly* wouldn't say that they are a uniform example of good design.
>> It amazes me that a package can go through so much semi-public design
>> review and still have serious design flaws.  Until one uses a library on
>> large projects with many people for a some reasonable period of time,
>> claims of excellence, esp from the library vendor, are premature.
>
> It would be interesting to know what (except for GUI-stuff) people are
> missing in OCaml or other FPLs. I just haven't used Java often enough
> to know details about its libraries.
>
> - Markus Mottl

While on the other hand I can't claim expertise in OCaml -- hundreds of 
lines of code do not an expert make!.  Perhaps someone else on the list has 
written OCaml/ML and Java for > 10,000 LOC?  I hope to become an OCaml 
expert this year, partly because I'm doing a port to the new Amiga VP/Taos 
architecture and partly because it is next on "the list".

Best,
Joe
-- 
Joseph R. Kiniry                   http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~kiniry/
California Institute of Technology       ID 78860581      ICQ 4344804