next steps

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to everyone for a brilliant effort to make the CUFP tutorial such a 
success! My highlight was Dave Scott "live fixing" the tree about one hour 
after the tutorial started :-)

So now that the dust has settled, here's some feedback:

- Running the tutorial as a Mirage program at the very beginning worked really 
well. Everyone was up and running with the slides on their local browser within 
the first 10 minutes. 

- The threading tutorial took about 2x longer than expected, as it's the first 
portion and everyone is getting familiar with basic concepts.  I cancelled the 
breaks (from 30 minutes to 5 minutes) so we made up the time, but everyone was 
quite tired by the end.

- Yaron Minsky suggested merging Core (the really nice Jane Street Capital 
standard libraries that are very featureful) with Mirage, so I'm investigating 
that.

- A few people suggested replacing our use of OCaml objects in the device 
manager with first-class modules. I've prototyped the various approaches in a 
Gist here: https://gist.github.com/1245418 , and it does indeed appear that 
this approach would work. I'll apply that change.

I'm also working on a PLDI submission (about "functional application 
synthesis"), and for that I'll branch the tree with a few hacks:

- Taking OCamlPro's reentrant runtime and get Mirage working as a kernel 
module, so we can experiment with type-safe network/storage in the kernel.

- Also apply OCamlPro's "command line functor" patch, and use that the formal 
foundation for our use of compile-time module specifications.  See: 
http://www.ocamlpro.com/code/2011-08-10-ocaml-pack-functors.html

In terms of a release, we need to figure out what the best thing to do is with 
regards to using Core versus the OCaml standard library. If anyone investigates 
Async and Lwt integration, let the list know!

Anil