[Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Fabrice Le Fessant]

A few weeks ago, we started a project called "Caml Development Kit" or
CDK, which would gather in one big tarball or RPM several tools and
libraries, useful for Ocaml programming. 

For example, the CDK will include Ocaml, Camlp4, ledit, and many
user-contributed libraries. A new CDK will be released at each Ocaml
release (and probably more often from CVS sources), removing the need
to update, compile and install many different packages everytime to
have a coherent development envirronment.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, you can either
send me your code, or an URL where we can download your contribution.

We are particularly interested in general modules, providing useful
data structures, network(urlget,http_server,etc)/ crypto(des)/
multimedia(images) functions, or bindings to C libraries. 

The package includes a simple tool to generate HTML from .mli files.
Thus, contributions must provide .mli files for all interesting
modules, and these .mli files must be correctly documented.

Have a look at the just created web site:

http://pauillac.inria.fr/cdk

- Fabrice

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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Patrick M Doane]

This is excellent news! I'm looking forward to helping with this effort.

I have quite a bit of code lying around on my machine for working with
e-mail protocols (such as POP, SMTP, NNTP, IMAP, etc) and associated data. 
I recently created a Sourceforge project to try to organize an effort to
making high-quality Ocaml modules for these types of modules.  For those
interested, it is located at: 

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocamlnet/

I have placed a project goals document but not much source code yet for a
reason that this CDK project might be able to resolve: 

As much as I love Caml as a language, I have to admit that I've been less
than pleased with the standard infrastructure for string manipulation. 
First a summary of approaches that I'm aware of: 

  1) Manipulate the string manually with functions like String.index and
maintain position variables.  I find this to be pretty error-prone and
hard to read.

  2) Use the stream parsers.  I hesitate to use them because of their
status as "experimental" and that be removed at any time. I also have
heard claims that their performance is not too good compared with other
techniques.  Does anyone know if this true? 

  3) Use ocamllex.  This would be the most natural approach to me but
their utility is hampered by not being able to pass additional parameters
to the rules.  I understand that there is patch available that adds this
functionality, but it's part of the standard distribution.

  4) Use a regular expression matching library.  The builtin Str is
not thread-safe which is problematic. PCRE and xstr provide good
alternatives. Too many choices here though.

  5) Write another custom module for string manipulation!

Since I wasn't happy with the builtin functions and didn't want to rely on
a third party distribution, I opted for option 5 while writing a good bit
of the code.  But then I think, does the world really need another string
manipulation library? 

If we can converge on a small set of good workable solutions, then it'll
make it much easier to produce a large set of modules for protocols and
parsing.

Any thoughts?
Patrick

On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Fabrice Le Fessant wrote:

> 
> A few weeks ago, we started a project called "Caml Development Kit" or
> CDK, which would gather in one big tarball or RPM several tools and
> libraries, useful for Ocaml programming. 
> 
> For example, the CDK will include Ocaml, Camlp4, ledit, and many
> user-contributed libraries. A new CDK will be released at each Ocaml
> release (and probably more often from CVS sources), removing the need
> to update, compile and install many different packages everytime to
> have a coherent development envirronment.
> 
> If you are interested in contributing to this project, you can either
> send me your code, or an URL where we can download your contribution.
> 
> We are particularly interested in general modules, providing useful
> data structures, network(urlget,http_server,etc)/ crypto(des)/
> multimedia(images) functions, or bindings to C libraries. 
> 
> The package includes a simple tool to generate HTML from .mli files.
> Thus, contributions must provide .mli files for all interesting
> modules, and these .mli files must be correctly documented.
> 
> Have a look at the just created web site:
> 
> http://pauillac.inria.fr/cdk
> 
> - Fabrice
> 
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> 

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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Brian Rogoff]

On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Patrick M Doane wrote:
> As much as I love Caml as a language, I have to admit that I've been less
> than pleased with the standard infrastructure for string manipulation. 
> First a summary of approaches that I'm aware of: 
> 
>   1) Manipulate the string manually with functions like String.index and
> maintain position variables.  I find this to be pretty error-prone and
> hard to read.
> 
>   2) Use the stream parsers.  I hesitate to use them because of their
> status as "experimental" and that be removed at any time. I also have
> heard claims that their performance is not too good compared with other
> techniques.  Does anyone know if this true? 

This is like shooting squirrels with a sniper rifle. It's quite a bit more 
power than you need for most string processing tasks. I certainly wouldn't 
worry about the "experimental" label since it's been there for quite a
long time. 

Why not steal the substring library from the SML Basis? It's a variant on
your 1) and has the added advantage that we can lift much of the
documentation from the SML community. 

It might even be worthwhile to just steal as much of the Basis library as
possible from Mosml and SML/NJ. Stealing code is this way is good, and it
allows SML programmers to migrate more easily (and ultimately would allow 
Caml programmers easy migration too) which is a good thing. 

As far as regexp libraries go, I like Pcre, but I haven't tried xstr. 

-- Brian


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[Caml-list] Streams

[Daniel de Rauglaudre]

Hello,

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 07:15:54PM -0800, Brian Rogoff wrote:

> >   2) Use the stream parsers.  I hesitate to use them because of their
> > status as "experimental" and that be removed at any time. I also have
> > heard claims that their performance is not too good compared with other
> > techniques.  Does anyone know if this true? 
> 
> This is like shooting squirrels with a sniper rifle. It's quite a bit more 
> power than you need for most string processing tasks. I certainly wouldn't 
> worry about the "experimental" label since it's been there for quite a
> long time. 

Streams date from 1992. They have been implemented in Caml Light.

I added them in OCaml but actually it was an error: streams and
streams parsers are just syntactic sugar, it is work for Camlp4, but
Camlp4 did not exist at this time.  We plan to remove them from OCaml
but after having moved Camlp4 in OCaml contribution directory.

-- 
Daniel de RAUGLAUDRE
daniel.de_rauglaudre@inria.fr
http://cristal.inria.fr/~ddr/
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Re: [Caml-list] Streams

[Daniel de Rauglaudre]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 10:25:41AM +0200, Christophe Raffalli wrote:

> I (and many others ?) have a lot of lines using stream parsers. I prefer to
> write stream parsers using their higher order power than camlyacc which does
> more thing automatically but is basically first order.
> 
> So if you remove them, keep some compatibility using a simple option calling
> camlp4 in the correct way ! Please !!

It will remain compatible. From now, you can absolutely add "-pp
camlp4o" in your Makefile for files containing streams and stream
parsers. If you don't do that now, you streams are slow.

Therefore, suppressing them from OCaml is to prevent people to have
slow streams without knowing it.

-- 
Daniel de RAUGLAUDRE
daniel.de_rauglaudre@inria.fr
http://cristal.inria.fr/~ddr/
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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Daniel de Rauglaudre]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 09:12:42PM -0500, Patrick M Doane wrote:

>   2) Use the stream parsers.  I hesitate to use them because of their
> status as "experimental" and that be removed at any time. I also have
> heard claims that their performance is not too good compared with other
> techniques.  Does anyone know if this true? 

For optimal speed and tail recursion, code holding streams or streams
parsers have to be preprocessed by Camlp4. Do:
    ocamlc -pp camlp4o foo.ml
instead of:
    ocamlc foo.ml

It can make a big difference.

-- 
Daniel de RAUGLAUDRE
daniel.de_rauglaudre@inria.fr
http://cristal.inria.fr/~ddr/
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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Chris Hecker]

> As much as I love Caml as a language, I have to admit that I've been less
>than pleased with the standard infrastructure for string manipulation.

Slightly off-topic, but anybody who's interested in string processing should read the bottom part of the interview with Ilya Zakharevich.  He talks about how Perl's text processing is really not all that great, and he has a lot of good things to say.  Here's a snippet.  It would be a coup for Caml to have a module that supports some of these features before other languages:

---------
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/09/ilya.html
Let me also mention that classifying the text handling facilities of Perl as "extremely agile" gives me the willies. Perl's regular expressions are indeed more convenient than in other languages. However, the lack of a lot of key text-processing ingredients makes Perl solutions for many averagely complicated tasks either extremely slow, or not easier to maintain than solutions in other languages (and in some cases both). 
...
---------

Chris


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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Matthieu Villeneuve]

Chris Hecker wrote:
> 
> > As much as I love Caml as a language, I have to admit that I've been less
> >than pleased with the standard infrastructure for string manipulation.
> 
> Slightly off-topic, but anybody who's interested in string processing should read the bottom part of the interview with Ilya Zakharevich.  He talks about how Perl's text processing is really not all that great, and he has a lot of good things to say.  Here's a snippet.  It would be a coup for Caml to have a module that supports some of these features before other languages:
> 
> ---------
> http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/09/ilya.html
> Let me also mention that classifying the text handling facilities of Perl as "extremely agile" gives me the willies. Perl's regular expressions are indeed more convenient than in other languages. However, the lack of a lot of key text-processing ingredients makes Perl solutions for many averagely complicated tasks either extremely slow, or not easier to maintain than solutions in other languages (and in some cases both).
> ...

Also, a Perl developer saying that Lisp is an "inherently unreadable
language" always makes you see life in a different way... ;-)


--Matthieu

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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Jacques Garrigue]

Hello Fabrice,

> A few weeks ago, we started a project called "Caml Development Kit" or
> CDK, which would gather in one big tarball or RPM several tools and
> libraries, useful for Ocaml programming. 
>
> For example, the CDK will include Ocaml, Camlp4, ledit, and many
> user-contributed libraries. A new CDK will be released at each Ocaml
> release (and probably more often from CVS sources), removing the need
> to update, compile and install many different packages everytime to
> have a coherent development envirronment.

Nice idea, but how do you handle dependencies, and configuration.
Notice also that many OSs/distribution have their own notion
of package, which they may prefer over a monolythic build.

Moving everything to findlib might be a good idea.
 
> If you are interested in contributing to this project, you can either
> send me your code, or an URL where we can download your contribution.

Of course I'm interested. Get anything you like from
http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/soft/olabl/ocaml.html

Do you need to have all the code in your own CVS, or can we use a more
distributed approach ?

> The package includes a simple tool to generate HTML from .mli files.
> Thus, contributions must provide .mli files for all interesting
> modules, and these .mli files must be correctly documented.

OK, the format used seems to differ a bit from the main ocaml
distribution, but this should be doable.
By the way, are labels a sufficient documentation for most functions ?

Best Regards,

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacques Garrigue      Kyoto University     garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
		<A HREF=http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~garrigue/>JG</A>
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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Sven LUTHER]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 03:03:22PM +0200, Fabrice Le Fessant wrote:
> 
> A few weeks ago, we started a project called "Caml Development Kit" or
> CDK, which would gather in one big tarball or RPM several tools and
> libraries, useful for Ocaml programming. 

Hello Fabrice, ...

I think this is a very nice idea.

Are you also aware of the debian-ocaml packaging effort, it is a plan to
integrate as much of the ocaml stuff in official debian packages. Upto now, we
have (at least) ocaml, ocaml-doc, lablgtk, lablgl, mlgtk, mldvi, ocamlp4,
ocamlweb, findlib, ocaml-tools (a collection of smaller thigns), hevea, and
more that i don't remember just yet.

We have both a mailing list (debian-ocaml-maint@lists.debian.org) with a
complete mailing list archive, and a web page :
http://www3.inrets.fr/Public/ESTAS/Mariano.Georges/OCamlDebian/html/

As well as a small group of people interested in working on this.

I would think that since the two effort share some common ideas, that it would
be nice to if not join, at least speak with each other about this issues, or
maybe cross post any mail discution on this ?

What do you think about it ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Fabrice Le Fessant]

Thanks all for your interest in the CDK project.  We have started
looking at all the libraries which have been proposed for
contribution to the CDK. 

We have now to integrate them in the CDK environment, ie change the
Makefiles, remove duplicate code, move generic modules in a generic
library, etc...

In particular, for Jacques, it means that the contributed code must
not stay self-contained, as it was before, but be smoothly integrated
in the CDK environment. Thus, you will have to develop the package,
maybe in your own CVS repository, but as a part of the CDK ...

As a first step, we will release soon a beta release of the CDK, and a
set of rules for packages to be easily integrated, from the experience
we will gain from the first libraries ...

Best regards,

- Fabrice
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Re: [Caml-list] Caml Development Kit

[Dale Arntson]

Is there any chance you could open up a Win32 branch of the CDK project?
Windows people often have fewer tools and less experience at assembling
the disparate libraries. I have, for example, had trouble getting
ocamlgtk working under Win32.

Regards,

-dale

Fabrice Le Fessant wrote:
> 
> Thanks all for your interest in the CDK project.  We have started
> looking at all the libraries which have been proposed for
> contribution to the CDK.
> 
> We have now to integrate them in the CDK environment, ie change the
> Makefiles, remove duplicate code, move generic modules in a generic
> library, etc...
> 
> In particular, for Jacques, it means that the contributed code must
> not stay self-contained, as it was before, but be smoothly integrated
> in the CDK environment. Thus, you will have to develop the package,
> maybe in your own CVS repository, but as a part of the CDK ...
> 
> As a first step, we will release soon a beta release of the CDK, and a
> set of rules for packages to be easily integrated, from the experience
> we will gain from the first libraries ...
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> - Fabrice
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