Hello
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of March 25 to April 01, 2008.
Soonho Kong writes: > Olmar(http://www.cs.ru.nl/~tews/olmar/) was the best candidate among > them. I have two questions about it. If you try Olmar I would be interested in your experience! Further, as the documentation is inexistent (there are almost no Olmar users), if you hit a problem, don't hesitate to ask me. For documenting the Olmar ast see the Elsa ast nodes pages in the Mozilla wiki (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Elsa_ast_nodes). There is not much additional information in there, but at least you can click through the interfaces and add your own findings. We know a bit more than what's in the wiki, so don't hesitate to ask on the oink-devel mailing list. If you try Olmar I would suggest that you use the cvs version, there have been lots of changes/improvements since the last release. > 2. If anyone have used Olmar before, I'd like to listen to your > experience with it. I'm curious of its tolerance with various C++ > dialects, robustness, and efficiency on the code used in real world. Olmar relies on Elsa for parsing, so this is really a question about the capabilities of Elsa. The current Elsa version can't parse all new gcc headers, through I never run into this problem and use whatever header are installed on my system. For Mozilla this was a real problem, but Taras Glek's blog seems to indicate that they fixed most of those in their Elsa branch in the pork repository. A problem with Elsa is that the current maintainer makes it really difficult to contribute something back. Therefore everybody has there own (incompatible) Elsa branch. A problem with Olmar is that you cannot simply use it with a different Elsa branch. But I am working in that direction... However, my current contract ends this April and I might not have any time left for Olmar then. If you decide for Olmar you must be prepared to take over maintenance. David Teller writes: > I personally haven't used it, but I'm pretty sure it's what Mozilla is > using to rewrite their code for automatic exception rewriting. Which is > a good sign. I am not completely sure, but I would be surprised, if Mozilla already uses Olmar.
It took us a little while, but CDuce and all its dependencies are now part of Fedora. It will appear in a few weeks as an update to Fedora 8, and is a standard package from Fedora 9 onwards. This is a pretty complete build which should include every feature including the OCaml syntax extension. The only part we couldn't get working in time was 64 bit PowerPC platform support which is down to an unrelated bug in our port of the OCaml compiler to Linux/ppc64. I would really like members of the CDuce community to try it out. Even if you don't run Fedora now, you can install Fedora under virtualization using QEmu[1], or run Fedora from a Live CD[2]. After installing Fedora, you should be able to get CDuce and its dependencies by running this command as root: Fedora 8: yum --enablerepo=development install cduce Fedora 9: yum install cduce Any problems with installation, please contact me. If you find any bugs related to the Fedora port of CDuce, please report them through https://bugzilla.redhat.com/ Thanks to Xavier Lamien and Giuseppe Castagna for their invaluable help with this release. Rich. [1] http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ [2] http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora, http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease
Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop (CUFP) 2008
Functional Programming As a Means, Not an End
Call for Presentations
Sponsored by SIGPLAN
Co-located with ICFP 2008
_________________________________________________________________
Presentation proposals due 2 June 2008
http://cufp.functionalprogramming.com
_________________________________________________________________
Functional languages have been under academic development for over 25
years, and remain fertile ground for programming language research.
Recently, however, developers in industrial, governmental, and open
source projects have begun to use functional programming successfully
in practical applications. In these settings, functional programming
has often provided dramatic leverage, including whole new ways of
thinking about the original problem.
The goal of the CUFP workshop is to act as a voice for these users of
functional programming. The workshop supports the increasing viability
of functional programming in the commercial, governmental, and
open-source space by providing a forum for professionals to share
their experiences and ideas, whether those ideas are related to
business, management, or engineering. The workshop is also designed to
enable the formation and reinforcement of relationships that further
the commercial use of functional programming. Providing user feedback
to language designers and implementors is not a primary goal of the
workshop, though it will be welcome if it occurs.
Speaking at CUFP
If you use functional programming as a means, rather than as an end,
we invite you to offer to give a talk at the workshop. Alternatively,
if you know someone who would give a good talk, please nominate them!
Talks are typically 30-45 minutes long, but can be shorter. They aim
to inform participants about how functional programming played out in
real-world applications, focusing especially on the re-usable lessons
learned, or insights gained. Your talk does not need to be highly
technical; for this audience, reflections on the commercial,
management, or software engineering aspects are, if anything, more
important. You do not need to submit a paper!
If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone to do
so, send an e-mail to jim (dot) d (dot) grundy (at) intel (dot) com or
simonpj (at) microsoft (dot) com by 2 June 2008 with a short
description of what you'd like to talk about or what you think your
nominee should give a talk about. Such descriptions should be about
one page long.
Program Plans
CUFP 2008 will last a full day and feature an invited presentation
from Michael Hopcroft, the product unit manager for the forthcoming
release of Microsoft Visual Studio F#. Additionally, the program
will include a mix of presentations and discussion sessions. Topics
will range over a wide area, including:
* Case studies of successful and unsuccessful uses of functional
programming;
* Business opportunities and risks from using functional languages;
* Enablers for functional language use in a commercial setting;
* Barriers to the adoption of functional languages, and
* Mitigation strategies for overcoming limitations of functional
programming.
There will be no published proceedings, as the meeting is intended to
be more a discussion forum than a technical interchange.
Program Committee
* Lennart Augustsson <lennart (dot) augustsson (at) gmail (dot) com>
* Matthias Blume <blume (at) tti-c (dot) org>
* Adam Granicz <granicz (dot) adam (at) intellifactory (dot) com>
* Jim Grundy (co-chair) <jim (dot) d (dot) grundy (at) intel (dot) com>
* John Lalonde <lalonde (at) abstrax (dot) com>
* Andy Martin <akmartin (at) us (dot) ibm (dot) com>
* Yaron Minsky <yminsky (at) janestcapital (dot) com>
* Simon Peyton Jones (co-chair) <simonpj (at) microsoft (dot) com>
* Ulf Wiger <ulf (dot) wiger (at) ericsson (dot) com>
This will be the fifth CUFP, for more information - including reports
from attendees of previous events - see the workshop web site:
http://cufp.functionalprogramming.com
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