From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Original-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Received: from mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.83]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 62BCDBBAF for ; Sun, 3 Jan 2010 11:50:09 +0100 (CET) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AvM8AGMFQEtQW+UMgWdsb2JhbACRSIl9AQEWJLR5hDEEhTg X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.47,492,1257116400"; d="scan'208";a="40657666" Received: from lo.gmane.org ([80.91.229.12]) by mail2-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/AES256-SHA; 03 Jan 2010 11:50:09 +0100 Received: from list by lo.gmane.org with local (Exim 4.50) id 1NRO28-0004C5-Fz for caml-list@inria.fr; Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:50:04 +0100 Received: from ks300734.kimsufi.com ([91.121.65.225]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:50:04 +0100 Received: from sylvain by ks300734.kimsufi.com with local (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:50:04 +0100 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: caml-list@inria.fr From: Sylvain Le Gall Subject: Re: general question, was Re: OCaml is broken Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 10:49:38 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: <4B2D2BC1.6020204@msu.edu> <200912200443.57698.jon@ffconsultancy.com> <200912201938.06729.jon@ffconsultancy.com> <20091221152631.35b3a2eb@pbmiha.malagasy.com> <8D2436E9-A41B-48D4-B844-A82E57D47CA2@pulsschlag.net> X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: ks300734.kimsufi.com User-Agent: slrn/pre1.0.0-11 (Linux) Sender: news X-Spam: no; 0.00; le-gall:01 ocaml:01 planing:01 ocaml:01 extensively:01 compiler:01 jocaml:01 camlp:01 parallelism:01 wrote:01 compile:01 dependency:01 functional:02 functional:02 languages:03 On 21-12-2009, Keyan wrote: > Hi, > > i have a large project written in C++, for which i am planing to write > add-ons and tools in ocaml, e.g. different tools to analyse my code > (dependency stuff), an interpreter for a script-language i plan to > include, etc, etc. form my time at the uni i remembered that ocaml > allows to compile libraries which can be included in c/c++ program, > and i know people who use it extensively in other projects. therefore, > i decided to give ocaml a try. i like functional programming, and my > first steps with ocaml are very promising. > > following this discussion, i am not so sure anymore, if ocaml is a > good decision. may be i got this discussion wrong, but if ocaml is > dying out, i might have to look for another functional programming > language to use with my project. > OCaml is not dying out at all (v3.11.2 is being prepared, v3.12.0 is coming soon). Of course, the core OCaml distribution (the one shipped by INRIA), is missing some features. You can use libraries/alternative compiler to have these features back (cothreads, jocaml, camlp3l). The only point of the whole discussion -- which is a recurring point by some of those who participate -- is the lack of shared-memory parallelism in the core language. Other languages like C or C++ are also lacking this support in their core definition... I.e. there is way to do it but you need to use pthread or Win32 thread. All in all, you can go a long way writing your tools with OCaml without encounting these problems. For the topic you describe, OCaml is a good choice. Regards, Sylvain Le Gall