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Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 18:36:37 +0400
From: Peter Zotov <whitequark@whitequark.org>
Cc: Benjamin Canou <benjamin.canou@gmail.com>, caml-list@inria.fr
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Subject: Re: [Caml-list] proposal for finding, loading and composing ppx
  preprocessors

On 2014-07-11 18:21, Daniel Bünzli wrote:
> Le vendredi, 11 juillet 2014 à 14:31, Benjamin Canou a écrit :
>> What do you think ?
> If I understand correctly this is a ppx for selectively using ppxs
> over a file. Bonus points for the higher-order ppx.
> 
> Since apparently we have to deal with this crap until we actually get
> something decent for static meta programming in this language,
> wouldn't it be easier to just define a standard annotation as you
> suggest, and then have some kind of "ppxdep" tool that just spits you
> the flags you will have to put on the command line in order to be able
> to compile it ?

This would require extensive changes to buildsystems (or just to 
ocamldep;
that doesn't make it easier), which, as I understand, this proposal is 
aiming
to avoid.

Personally I don't see anything wrong with just supplying -package to
ocamlfind c invocation, directly, via _tags, via _oasis (and possibly
_tags too, for more finely grained control) or whatever build system are
you using.

Alain Frisch suggested that constant forking might slow down builds, and
suggested some kind of a frontend that would automatically link (not 
even
dynlink) a compound ppx to make builds faster, especially on Windows.

I wonder if we should just get rid of a Unix-like build pipeline 
entirely,
and just make a hybrid frontend-buildsystem that would use compiler-libs
and never execute an external OCaml process. This would make builds even
faster and it's the logical conclusion of Alain's suggestion.

-- 
Peter Zotov
sip:whitequark@sipnet.ru