Re: [Caml-list] Native toplevel? (was: OCamlJit 2.0)

[Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>]

On Nov 19, 2010, at 19:30 , Ashish Agarwal wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Hezekiah M. Carty <hcarty@atmos.umd.edu> wrote:
> 
> ocamlscript is certainly a wonderful tool, for prototyping and
> otherwise.  It unfortunately doesn't help specifically with the "load
> a large file and do something with it" case.
> 
> Right.
> 
> Also, I should mention that a high-performance toplevel, combined with new libraries like OCaml-R, would essentially make OCaml a competitor to Matlab and R. This would really expand OCaml's scope to an important area.

This was actually the main motivation for OCamlJit, tho we did not specifically need a competitor to Matlab (we use tuareg mode most of the time, to prototype term rewriting/typing stuff, but also for some complex LaTeX generation tasks). After thinking about it for a few days now, I think a native toplevel would indeed solve the problem, in a better way than a byte-code JITter. I'll try to look into the remaining issues with the native toplevel, but I have some other stuff to finish first.

Benedikt