Most proj= ects are either academic research or industrial products. In academia, rein= venting a common language run-time won’t get funding because it is no= t novel enough. In industry, products that aren’t economically viable= in the mid-term (years) or sooner won’t get funding. So the common s= olutions don’t work here.

<= span style=3D'font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F= 497D'>

There are at = least two alternatives. One is to join forces with a massive company like M= icrosoft who are willing to risk comparatively huge lead times, as they did= with .NET, but the result will be proprietary. The other is to earn millio= ns yourself and invest in the R&D that you think will be most beneficia= l, as Stephen Wolfram did.

Perhaps another al= ternative would be to adopt Microsoft’s CLR and focus on creating an = open source implementation that has a working garbage collector and decent = performance.

Also, interoperability is not th= e only benefit of a common language run-time. Another major benefit is matu= rity: because you have multiple languages sitting on top of the same run-ti= me all of the programs in all of those languages are testing your run-time.=

<= /p>

Cheers,

Jon.

&nb= sp;

From:= Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons [mailto:dofp.ocaml@gmail.com]=
Sent: 10 December 2011 10:36
To: caml-list
Subj= ect: [Caml-list] Why isn't there a common platform for functional langu= age interaction ?

Caml-list,
Given that other people are raising trolls, here is mine...

I have = to admit I appreciate F# transparent interaction with C# libraries which al= lows me to use large amounts of code that I would have had to poorly rewrit= e otherwise (GUI, database, web stuff, etc). Same happens with SML, Caml, H= askell and F#, some pieces of code are just way better in one language than= in the others, and you end partially porting these libraries to Caml which= is a waste of time and you don't benefit from the updates of the original = code and nobody but you can maintain your quick-and-dirty port.

Why = isn't there a core functional languages to which everyone could compile, on= which the compiler research could be done (certification, optimisation, ga= rbage collection) and that would allow full interaction of the different di= alects at run-time ?

At some point I thought that C-- (http://www.cminusminus.org/index.html<= /a>) and that type of work would converge to that but it never happened.
Diego Olivier