Re: [Caml-list] ocaml considered dangerous

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

No, it does not. It makes the printf codebase easier to work with (if
you know your GADTs), but lately the tendency has rather been to hope
for *less* complex stuff in formats, rather than more.

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 10:11 AM, David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com> wrote:
> Does this new version fix positional specifiers? (http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=4204) or has that rather useful (if never working!) feature been consigned to history?
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: caml-list-request@inria.fr [mailto:caml-list-request@inria.fr] On
>> Behalf Of Gabriel Scherer
>> Sent: 18 January 2014 07:05
>> To: Jeremy Yallop
>> Cc: Jon Harrop; Jacques Garrigue; OCaML List Mailing
>> Subject: Re: [Caml-list] ocaml considered dangerous
>>
>> I guess one could also mention that the no-magic implementation is notably
>> faster than the current implementation (as it avoids any format string
>> parsing at runtime), which is not necessarily a concern for printf (for
>> large output you're probably killed by I/O overhead
>> anyway) but can be for sprintf or bprintf.
>>
>> Note that while the current proposal uses GADTs, Benoît also experimented
>> with reasonable similar designs using higher-order function (this is the
>> usual initial vs. final tagless interpreter
>> choice) that would have been implementable before 4.00.
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 3:22 AM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Jacques Garrigue wrote:
>> >>> By the way, there is now an implementation of Printf that avoids most
>> of the Obj.magic by using GADTs. It should be merged soon.
>> >
>> > Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
>> >> Just curious: is that a drop-in replacement?
>> >
>> > Yes, except for some tiny incompatibilities, mostly fixes for bugs
>> > that the development of the GADT version uncovered in the original
>> > implementation.  The patch is here, along with a description and some
>> > discussion:
>> >
>> >    http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6017
>> >
>> > The author, Benoît Vaugon, presented the design along with some
>> > performance figures at OCaml 2013:
>> >
>> >    http://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2013/proposals/formats-as-gadts.pdf
>> >    http://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2013/slides/vaugon.pdf
>> >
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