From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pB9C8m3F011195 for ; Fri, 9 Dec 2011 13:08:48 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AhEBABn54U5KfVM2kGdsb2JhbABDqnAIIgEBAQEJCQ0HFAQhgXIBAQEDARICLAEBNwEPCzQSNAEFARwGLQiHZQIGmVIKijOEHAGNfgeLD2OiZT2Deg X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,325,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="122739329" Received: from mail-ee0-f54.google.com ([74.125.83.54]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/RC4-SHA; 09 Dec 2011 13:08:43 +0100 Received: by eekc50 with SMTP id c50so2096326eek.27 for ; Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:08:42 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=googlemail.com; s=gamma; h=subject:mime-version:content-type:from:in-reply-to:date:cc :content-transfer-encoding:message-id:references:to:x-mailer; bh=CNWW1nAQrY4yWljN6CCWOeolWsbsXXEP6en14ArxFhk=; b=xgzP9yB3NuByxmRSztCFJTqxOctEkw06QPcwSbrk3oYXAL7HpwsDT14tovOkPWXGfa MHbwLrjLoLJl/pBy7ZuFJQ7exQ2Z86cqCY8jY8eqUsXDESQPBU5ezTD1z8HPMJWoQTop LmmsVWvgsEL5qtha1u5gK3eKjrBVbXhoYOXBY= Received: by 10.14.30.101 with SMTP id j77mr828593eea.84.1323432521386; Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:08:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from coruscant.kosmos.all (ip-95-223-170-32.unitymediagroup.de. [95.223.170.32]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id a60sm30363726eeb.4.2011.12.09.04.08.38 (version=SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:08:39 -0800 (PST) Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1251.1) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 From: Benedikt Meurer In-Reply-To: Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 13:08:40 +0100 Cc: =?iso-8859-1?Q?St=E9phane_Glondu?= , oleg@okmij.org, caml-list@inria.fr, ontologiae@gmail.com, caml@inria.fr Message-Id: References: <20111209065758.94306.qmail@eeoth.pair.com> <4EE1BE59.4020804@glondu.net> To: Gabriel Scherer X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1251.1) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by walapai.inria.fr id pB9C8m3F011195 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Why NOT to compile OCaml via C On Dec 9, 2011, at 10:58 , Gabriel Scherer wrote: >> I find the idea of making ocamlopt a GCC (or >> LLVM) frontend the most sensible and constructive one I've seen in these >> discussions. > > I found back some of this links thanks to the excellent "OCaml Weekly > News" summary: > http://alan.petitepomme.net/cwn/2011.08.02.html > (Where Benedikt announces that he has a student working on an LLVM backend.) You can follow the progress here: https://github.com/colinbenner/ocamlllvm It does work for some simple examples already, but it's still very early prototype quality and requires a patched LLVM. LLVM as such is not a bad idea for the compiler backend, but getting things to work with stuff compiled by the regular OCaml backends is the difficult part. We'll see how that turns out. >> However, one barrier is the licensing: QPL is incompatible with almost >> any license (even QT does no longer use it!). Has it ever been >> considered to switch the "public" license to e.g. GPLv3 (which looks >> constraining enough, and compatible with GCC)? > > Stéphane, I am surprised at how good your are at raising trollish topics ! I don't think it's a trollish topic raised by Stéphane. The QPL is a serious problem and I fear many of us may already already be violating the terms of the QPL, it would be nice to get rid of that issue at some point. The exact license (GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, ...) doesn't matter all that much, almost every other open source license is better than the QPL (just my 2c). Benedikt