Hello
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of November 08 to 15, 2011.
Archive: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-11/msg00078.html
Benedikt Meurer announced:
This post announces the 0.1.0 release of the ocamlnat project, which aims to
provide a native code toplevel for the OCaml language, that is mostly
compatible to the byte code toplevel, but up to 100 times faster.
Home page: http://benediktmeurer.de/ocamlnat
Forge page: https://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/ocamlnat
GitHub page: https://github.com/bmeurer/ocamlnat
Current features:
- Support for x86 and x86-64 processors running Unix-like systems (tested
with Linux and Mac OS X), and experimental support for Win32.
- Mostly compatible with the byte code toplevel `ocaml`, although some
functionality is not provided (yet), i.e. tracing does not work.
- Includes an implementation of the linear scan register allocator for
increased performance (default is currently the old graph coloring register
allocator for well-known stability).
- Separated from the OCaml distribution, can be installed in addition to an
existing OCaml 3.12.1 installation.
- Experimental Findlib support, provides a mostly working Topfind interface
similar to what Findlib provides for the byte code toplevel.
Open issues:
- Better Findlib integration; packages should install .cmxs files for loading
into the native toplevel. Any ideas/help welcome.
- Porting to additional architectures (ARM, PowerPC).
- Windows port.
Archive: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-11/msg00080.html
Jacques Garrigue announced:
Some of you may already be aware that GADTs are available in trunk,
since this summer. Information is available here:
https://sites.google.com/site/ocamlgadt/
As you can see in the presentation, this first iteration had some
limitations (particularly it was mostly incompatible with objects and
polymorphic variants), which led us to try a new approach.
In this new iteration it is guaranteed that an ambiguous type cannot
escape the scope of a GADT pattern-matching, which leads to
(hopefully) more intuitive type inference, and allows to combine GADTs
with objects and polymorphic variants. The syntax is unchanged.
As this approach depends crucially on the above property of ambiguous
types not escaping, it requires as much testing as possible.
This is why I would like to invite interested people to test it and
report strange behavior.
The new code is in the branch branches/gadts-devel, or
http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ocaml/branches/gadts-devel/
Sample code is available in the subdirectory testsuite/tests/typing-gadts.
It includes Alain Frisch's example for safe type introspection,
extended with variants.
Please tell me if you find some unsoundness, or you cannot understand
why you get an error.
Markus W. Weißmann then said:
I've added a port "ocaml-devel" to MacPorts that builds the gadt-devel branch
(checked out from svn, revision 11273);
so for users of MacPorts you can simply deactivate your current ocaml
installation and install ocaml-devel to give it a try.
$> sudo port -f deactivate ocaml
$> sudo port install ocaml-devel
The ocaml libraries from MacPorts will not accept the development snapshot
though.
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/.
Modular Semantics for Brainfuck:
http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2011/11/modular-semantics-for-brainfuck.html
Release 2.0-alpha:
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=815
First release 0.1:
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=814
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