Hello
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of September 18 to 25, 2012.
Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-09/msg00063.html
Bob Zhang said:<Editor's note>This triggered a lively discussion. Please follow the archive link above to read it all.</Editor's note> Last week, I give a talk about the future of Camlp4 in the ML workshop, the slides are here http://www.lexifi.com/ml2012/slides_panel_hongbo.pdf (some are already done, some are work in progress). For a long time, in the caml community, thanks to the talented work of Daniel and Michel, we know there is a very very powerful tool called *camlp4*, if there are some bolierpolate code you write here and there, someone will tell you "hey, you can do it in camlp4" though he may not know how to do it in camlp4. But it's a bit embarassing that camlp4 did not evolve very well(partly due to the fragmentation of camlp[4,5]), another fact is that camlp4 is not *designed*, it's like a prototype that works but not carefully designed, and it does not provide anything out of the box and itself was written in a verbose way. It's time to bring the powerful tool back, my advisor Steve and I started a new project Fan, which is mainly to evolve the camlp4 macro system to be more expressive and more powerful, push the Camlp4 to the next level. For me, I am a long-term Lisp programmer, I appreciated the value of macros, I would really be happy to see we could make a such powerful macro systems. Here is my repo https://bitbucket.org/HongboZhang/camlp4 I already finished some cool staff, to mention just a few: 1. A very robust bootstrapping system, previously it takes me 20 minutes to verify my patches to camlp4 can reach a fixpoint or not, but now you can compile your modification within seconds, and reach a fixpoint under 2 minutes, this accelerate the development cycles immediately. 2. Now you can customize your lexer now, previously it's impossible( and a number of bug fixes) you can do deep anti-quotation like :expr< <:expr< $($(deepantiquot)) >> >> 3. Linking the compiler and a number of cool features (see the slides) 4. A macro which write macros to scrap all the bolierpolate code for generic programming, now you can customize your deriving stuff in ten lines (previously thousands of lines of code to write camlp4 plugin) 5. A number of mini-DSLs and more to be expected I love macros, I would commit to the project for a long time(probably my Ph.D term), I promise that I would write the documentation to make users happy( I am also writing a book about macros, it's un-readable though). And I am really happy to co-laborate with anyone who love camlp4. Syntax matters, if you see that coffescript is now already a success, camlp4 or Fan is actually more expressive than that, Dear ocaml programmers, let us find a way to make ocaml more beautiful. I am also open minded to any discussion about the future of camlp4
Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-09/msg00084.html
Philippe Veber asked and David House replied:> as one of the poor souls that could not make it to this year's caml > meeting, I'd like to know if the slides of the presentations will be > available at some point. Thanks! You can see all of the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP9g4dLR7xt6KzCYntNqYcw/videos As for slides themselves: the slides for the Async and debugging talks will be up on the Jane Street website as soon as Mark remembers to grab them off of his laptop...Anil Madhavapeddy also replied:
I've linked all of the videos, abstracts and slides that are available at the OUD website, at: http://oud.ocaml.org/ As speakers send me their slides, I will update the web page (this is possibly slightly challenging from some talks such as David Scott's, which was delivered as a self-hosted webserver using Mirage). I've also got various scribe reports from attendees that I will collate into a summary blog post next week, and mail out to the list.
Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-09/msg00119.html
Jeffrey Scofield announced:I just released a version of OCaml 4.00.0 that creates apps that run in the iOS Simulator. I call it OCamlXSim for short. You can download a binary release, or get instructions for bulding from sources: http://psellos.com/ocaml/compile-to-iossim.html After you've gotten your app working in the simulator, you can compile it for iOS and release it in the iOS App Store: http://psellos.com/ocaml/compile-to-iphone.html I also have a page of OCaml-on-iOS resources: http://psellos.com/ocaml/ It's quite a bit easier to make OCaml work for the iOS Simulator than for iOS because the i386 code generator works with no changes. The main trick is convincing ocamlopt to be a cross compiler. If you're interested in trying OCaml on iOS, starting with the simulator is great because you don't need a device, and you don't need to register as an iOS developer with Apple. My next project will be to work on an armv6 version of the OCaml-to-iOS compiler (which I call OCamlXARM). I'm very happy to hear from anybody interested in this project (or any similar ones).
Thanks to Alp Mestan, we now include in the Caml Weekly News the links to the recent posts from the ocamlcore planet blog at http://planet.ocamlcore.org/. Calcul avec OCaml 0.3: http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.cgi?contrib=790 Release 1.0.0: http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.cgi?contrib=798
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