Hello
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of September 29 to October 06, 2009.
Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/8db2b495140ca865#
Dawid Toton asked, Gerd Stolpmann replied, and Xavier Leroy said:
Dawid Toton wrote:
> I have lot of modules and they are compiled to native code.
> So I have .cmx and .o files and want to link them faster.
> Is is possible to make linking an associative operation acting on modules?
> [...]
> Documentation of ld says that files produced with --relocatable can be
> used as intermediate partially linked files. Can something like this be
> done with object code produced by ocamlopt?
Yes. "ocamlopt -pack" actually calls "ld -r" underneath to
consolidate several compilation units in a single .cmx/.o file.
"ld -r" will resolve references between these compilation units.
Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
> Well, you can link several .cmx files (and their accompanying .o files)
> to a .cmxa file (and an accompanying .a file): ocamlopt -a
From a linking standpoint, "ocamlopt -a" is equivalent to "ar": it
does not resolve any references, just concatenates individual
cmx/.o files in a single .cmxa/.a file. That can still speed up
linking a bit, since reading one big .a file is faster than reading a
zillion small .o files.
Generally speaking, I'm somewhat surprised that linking time is an
issue for Dawid. Modern Unix linkers are quite fast, and the
additional link-time work that OCaml does is small. Let us know if
you manage to narrow the problem.
Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/48e05d49b0f21b8a#
Continuing the thread from last week, Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen said:
In line with what Yaron suggests, you can use a combinator parser.
I do this to parse json, and this parser could be adapted to xml by
focusing on basic syntax and ignoring the details, or you could
prefilter xml and use the json parser directly.
See the Fleece parser embedded here:
There is also the object abstraction that dives into an object
hierarchy after parsing, see the Objects module. The combination of
these two makes it quite easy to work on structured data, but 3 lines
only come after some xml adaptation work - but you can see many
one-liner json access in the last part of the file.
http://git.dvide.com/pub/symbiosis/tree/myocamlbuild_config.ml
Otherwise there is xmlm which is self-contained in single xml file,
and as I recall, has some sort of zipper navigator. (I initially
intended to use it before deciding on the json format):
http://erratique.ch/software/xmlm
Richard Jones then replied:
It's interesting you mention xmlm, because I couldn't write
the code using xmlm at all.
The discussion here has got quite theoretical, but it's not helping
me to write the original 3 lines of Perl in OCaml.
my $p = XML::XPath->new (xml => $xml);
my @disks = $p->findnodes ('//devices/disk/source/@dev');
push (@disks, $p->findnodes ('//devices/disk/source/@file'));
My best effort, using xml-light, is around 40 lines:
http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=libguestfs.git;a=blob;f=ocaml/examples/viewer.ml;h=ef6627b1b92a4fff7d4fa1fa4aca63eeffc05ece;hb=HEAD#l322
Dario Teixeira suggested and Richard Jones replied:
> Ocamlduce has been mentioned before in this thread, but I didn't catch
> the reason why it has been discarded as a solution. Is it because you
> don't want to carry the extra (large) dependency, or is there some other
> reason?
Actually the reason is that I thought it wasn't available for 3.11.1,
but I just checked the website and it is, and ocamlduce does seem to
be the obvious solution for this problem. (However I'll need to try
and see if I can come up with the equivalent code).
> And on the subject of simple XML parsers for Ocaml, there's also the
> aptly named Simplexmlparser from the Ocsigen project [1]. It's about
> as spartan as one can conceive, yet sufficient for a large subset of
> XML extraction tasks.
>
> [1] http://ocsigen.org/docu/1.2.0/Simplexmlparser.html
Thanks - but if I understand that page correctly, then isn't it
just parsing XML into a tree?
After some exchanges with Alain Frisch on OCamlDuce, Richard Jones said and Alain Frisch replied:
> Thanks Alain. My latest attempt was similar to your version 1 above,
> and it works :-)
>
> Now my code looks like your version 2:
>
> let xml = from_string xml in
> let xs = {{ [xml] }} in
> let xs = {{ (((xs.(<domain..>_)) / .(<devices..>_)) / .(<disk..>_)) / }} in
> let xs = {{ map xs with
> | <source dev=(Latin1 & s) ..>_
> | <source file=(Latin1 & s) ..>_ -> [s]
> | _ -> [] }} in
> {: xs :}
>
> (plus the boilerplate for interfacing xml-light and CDuce).
>
> We're getting close to the xpath/perl solution (8 lines vs 3 lines),
> with some added type safety and the possibility of validating the XML.
>
> On the other hand, the code is hard to understand. It's not clear to
> me what the .( ) syntax means, nor why there is an apparently trailing
> / character.
From the manual:
If the x-expression e evaluates to an x-sequence, the construction e/
will result in a new x-sequence obtained by taking in order all the
children of the XML elements from the sequence e. For instance, the
x-expression [<a>[ 1 2 3 ] 4 5 <b>[ 6 7 8 ] ]/ evaluates to the x-value
[ 1 2 3 6 7 8 ].
If the x-expression e evaluates to an x-sequence, the construction e.(t)
(where t is an x-type) will result in a new x-sequence obtained by
filtering e to keep only the elements of type t. For instance, the
x-expression [<a>[ 1 2 3 ] 4 5 <b>[ 6 7 8 ] ].(Int) evaluates to the
x-value [ 4 5 ].
> I have some comments:
>
> (A) "Subtyping failed" is a very common error, but is only mentioned
> briefly in the manual. I have no idea what these errors mean, so they
> should have more explanation. Here is a simple one which was caused
> by me using a value instead of a list (but that is not at all obvious
> from the error message):
>
> Error: Subtyping failed Latin1 <= [ Latin1* ]
> Sample:
> [ Latin1Char ]
The error tells you that Latin1 is not a subtype of [ Latin1* ].
It probably means that you are trying to use a value of type Latin1
where a value of type [ Latin1* ] is expected.
> (B) I think the interfacing code here:
>
> http://yquem.inria.fr/~frisch/ocamlcduce/samples/expat/
> http://yquem.inria.fr/~frisch/ocamlcduce/samples/pxp/
> http://yquem.inria.fr/~frisch/ocamlcduce/samples/xmllight/
>
> should be distributed along with ocamlduce.
There was a GODI package that includes them. It would be ok to put these
files in the distribution without compiling them (otherwise it would
create a dependency on more OCaml packages). It's up to Stéphane Glondu,
the new maintainer of OCamlDuce.
Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/2b124f9874b2de18#
Till Varoquaux announced:
I am please to announce the release of dyn (homepage
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/dyn/). This release is made
possible by Jane Street capital who opened up the initial code.
Dyn is a camlp4 syntax extension for Ocaml that:
- Scaffolds injection and projection functions to an from dynamicaly typed
values (`dyn`).
- Reifies ocaml type representation in run-time inspectable values (`dtd`).
- Provides camlp4 quotations/antiquotations to work with `dyn`s and `dtd`s.
When the `pa_dyn` syntax is loaded it adds a new `type_conv` type processor
that can be called by appending `with dyn` after a type definition (e.g. `type
t = ... with dyn`) three values are defined:
val t_of_dyn : Dyn.Data.t -> t
val dyn_of_t : t -> Dyn.Data.t
val dtd_of_t : Dyn.DTD.t
Dynamic values (`dyn`)
----------------------
Dynamic values are represented using the ocaml type `Dyn.Data.t`:
| Unit
| Int of int
| Float of float
| Bool of bool
| String of string
| List of t list
| Record of (string * t) list
| Tuple of t list
| Variant of string * t list
Type representations (`dtd`)
----------------------------
The types for the `dtd`s is `Dyn.Dtd.t`. It is a straightforward mapping to
`Dyn.Data.t`. Unique id and laziness are used to deal with recursive
types.
Quotations and antiquotations
------------------------------
The syntax extension also has experimental support for quotations and
anti-quotations as syntactic sugar for values of types `Dyn.Data.t` and
`Dyn.Dtd.t` both in expressions and patterns. The following is a toy function
that extracts types from values using quotations and anti-quotations:
let rec guess = function
| <:dyn< ()>> -> <:dtd<unit>>
| <:dyn< $int:_$>> -> <:dtd<int>>
| <:dyn< $float:_$>> -> <:dtd<float>>
| <:dyn< $bool:_$>> -> <:dtd<bool>>
| <:dyn< $string:_$>> -> <:dtd<string>>
| <:dyn<[]>> -> <:dtd<unit list>> (* Technicaly a
'a list...*)
| <:dyn< $list:(h::_)$>> -> <:dtd< $guess h$ list>>
(* We should do unification to get correct results. *)
| <:dyn< $record:l$>> ->
<:dtd< $record:(List.map (fun (name,d) ->
name,guess d) l)$>>
| <:dyn< $tup:t$ >> -> <:dtd< $tup:(List.map guess t)$>>
| <:dyn< $variant:(n,vals)$ >> -> <:dtd< $variant:[n,List.map guess vals]$>>
Contributions are more than welcome.
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/.
New IP for *.ocamlcore.org:
http://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=437
overbld:
http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/overbld/
Another JSSP post:
http://ocaml.janestcapital.com/?q=node/69
RegStab 1.4:
http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.cgi?contrib=706
If you happen to miss a CWN, you can send me a message and I'll mail it to you, or go take a look at the archive or the RSS feed of the archives.
If you also wish to receive it every week by mail, you may subscribe online.