Re: next steps

[Fabrice LE FESSANT <fabrice@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/28/2011 04:27 PM, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
>> Having a more complete standard library seems a good idea. There are
>> two open questions though:
>> - how will it impact the size of the binaries? Will it make a native
>> equivalent of ocamlclean necessary?

A native equivalent of ocamlclean would be very difficult to implement,
as it would require whole-program analysis before code generation.

> I'm hoping that the OcamlPro namespaces patch will make this a non-issue; the 
> idea there is that subdirectories of modules can all be separately compiled 
> and packed individually. Fabrice, Thomas, can you comment on the feasibility 
> of this?

Indeed. The idea is just that packing modules would be replaced by
having a hierarchical naming scheme, so that only modules that are
actually used would be linked, instead of all modules that are packed
together. The compiler could -- but is not forced to -- use the
file-system hierarchy to infer namespaces for modules automatically, but
a namespace can also be provided just as an option to the compiler.

Note that there is still a difference between namespaces and modules,
i.e. namespaces are not modules.

For example, if you can generate A.X and A.Y both using either
namespaces (A would be a namespace) or pack (A would be a module), you
can only use module A as a functor argument, and never the namespace A
(who can only be used to qualify identifiers of modules).

Fabrice