So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier
Leroy's team of course.
Xavier Leroy has already said, for example during the former OCaml Meetings, that they would be happy to link to a more complete "OCaml distribution" provided by the community, including the core "INRIA lib" and some more. I think there is no clear consensus right now on what that would be, and that's why it hasn't been done yet, but there are several orthogonal efforts in that direction (more on that later).
2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss
<philou@philou.ch>
maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives)
have too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib
would have more users than a complete alternative.
[...]
I think it would be important and interesting to
create a little organization which discuss bout a standard lib and
would begin making a synthesis of all these "standard" library.
Batteries is meant to be an extension of INRIA's stdlib, as a continuation of the [Extlib] effort. Great care is taken that a code using the existing standard library should be able to replace it with Batteries without changing a line of code. If something breaks when converting to batteries, it should be filed as a bug.
[Extlib]
http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/The Core library from Jane Street has liberated itself from this conservative position. Programs should be written directly using Core, and it is not in principle easy to transition from INRIA's stdlib to Core (of course you could include both and be careful to avoid conflicts with "open"). The advantages are plenty: it allows Janestreet to provide a coherent set of packages and make different design choices (arguably some aspects of INRIA's stdlib are more "non choices"). On the other hand, it means that direct "synthesis" of both efforts (Core and Batteries) is not likely. There is also the difference that Batteries is a community-driven effort, while Core is more internal to Jane Street; they would probably welcome contributions, but their internal code is naturally their top priority, and the external release model has been rather sporadic for now.
Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye:
I think it would be important and interesting to
create a little organization which discuss bout a standard lib and
would begin making a synthesis of all these "standard" library.
the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big appeal.
Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years. With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml code. Of course, there still are a lot of rough edges, but the only way to go further is that the community (yes, you!) try to use those tools, popularize them, and also report feedback on what could be improved.
For a very long time, using OCaml has been a joyful but solitary activity. If you want a more vibrant community, the only thing to do is to do your part of the work as you would need the others to do. Set a standard, so that things that are now rare are taken for granted in the future. Nobody, except maybe Sylvain, has the devotion to work full-time on the small details that will improve things in the long run, and this is ok. Yes, writing an oasis file (or even a META) or contributing an obvious function to Batteries is tedious and certainly less sexy that a lot of things you're working on. But this won't happen magically.
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Pierre-Alexandre Voye
<ontologiae@gmail.com> wrote:
2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss
<philou@philou.ch>
Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit :
It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1 dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others, of sucess.
Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big problem.
I think it would be important and interesting to create a little organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a synthesis of all these "standard" library.
Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA.
maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have more users than a complete alternative.
the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big appeal.
I think INRIA, and in particular the Xavier Leroy's team, make what they can. Their work isn't to maintain OCaml but mainly to do research.
So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's team of course.