Re: [Caml-list] Comparison of OCaml and MLton for numerics

["Yaron Minsky" <yminsky@cs.cornell.edu>]

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On 6/1/07, Alain Frisch <Alain.Frisch@inria.fr> wrote:
>
>  MLton's strength is that
> you don't have to pay the price for abstraction, i.e. cleaning up your
> program (by factorizing it or making it more modular) does not degrade
> performance. I have no experience with MLton, but I don't believe that
> performances are much more difficult to predict than with OCaml
> (Stephen?).


I could not agree with this sentiment more.  Stephen actually now works at
Jane Street, and since his arrival he's taught us a  number of techniques
for using modules and functors to organize and factor code more
effectively.  Some of these techniques were obviously born in the context of
Mlton, where they have no performance penalty.  It's downright annoying to
have to avoid these techniques in performance-sensitive code in OCaml.  In
other words, factoring out with functors and modules is good style, but
OCaml penalizes you for it.

y

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