Re: [Caml-list] Re: multicore wish

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@recoil.org>]

On 28 Dec 2009, at 12:28, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:

> However, there are some problems: Values outside the heap do not support
> the polymorphic comparison and hash functions. That's a hard limitation,
> e.g. you cannot even compare two strings, or build a hash table with
> strings as keys. That limits the usefulness of shared memory.

Camlp4 may help here; Thomas Gazagnaire and I have been working on a language-integrated ORM, and it has a reliable type-conv hash generator library [1].

It works with mutable records as well as immutable ones (the main limitation of the built-in polymorphic hash function) but it could be used to generate explicit comparison functions for shared memory as well.  We need to split out the various support libraries in the ORM separately at some point anyway, so if the hash generator is of any use I'll cut a release.

[1] http://github.com/avsm/ocaml-orm-sqlite/tree/master/hash/

-anill