Re: [Caml-list] Why NOT to compile OCaml via C

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

> You can follow the progress here: https://github.com/colinbenner/ocamlllvm

Excellent!

Just a few questions:

- there are two different repos, ocamlllvm and ocaml-llvm (which has a
commit history that make it looks like it is where the real
development happen); which one should one follow? A wild guess after
only a quick look is that the ocaml-llvm repo did not build upon your
ocamlnat changes, and ocamllvm is about merging the changes on top of
it; but I really have no idea.

- you mention a "patched" LLVM; where can the patches be fetched? Do
you plan to present changes in such a way that it can be submitted
upstream? I think it is natural that you have to make changes to LLVM,
the GHC people (which now have an experimental LLVM backend) also did,
and I was under the impression that the LLVM people where quite
welcoming of their changes, they are glad to see LLVM being used in a
non-Clang-centric project. I think your patches could bring value to
LLVM, independently of the success of the ambitious ocaml backend
attempt.

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Benedikt Meurer
<benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> 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