Re: ocaml?? why?? (was: [Xen-devel] caml stubdom crashes)

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2 Apr 2009, at 23:13, Dan Magenheimer wrote:

> > They already do: XenEnterprise is mostly implemented in ocaml.
> Well, I suppose that's a good datapoint.  I wonder if the world's
> supply of ocaml programmers all work for Citrix/Xensource. ;-)
>
> But I'd question whether one good datapoint in a controlled
> single-product single-company focused startup environment
> is a good representation of the problems that might occur
> in a broader (e.g. open source) bazaar.
>
> > No problem so far with the language itself.
> This would seem to disagree with *No* problems.
> http://cufp.galois.com/2008/slides/MadhavapeddyAnil.pdf
I was merely pointing out in those slides that OCaml wasn't a perfect  
language, and that there were obviously areas where we found it was  
more difficult to do stuff than others.  Please remember the audience;  
I was pointing out areas where FP language researchers could focus  
their attention if they are interested in more "real-world" adoption  
of their particular breed of languages.
Compared to the early sprawling mass of Twisted Python, or a complex C  
implementation riddled with memory corruption, OCaml was (and remains)  
a fantastic choice.
It is a really nice systems language mainly because the run-time is  
very, very simple.  You could read through it in a few hours (src/ 
byterun) and come away with a good idea of how the garbage collector  
and heap representation works.  Because types are stripped away at  
compile-time, the stuff sitting in memory is very regular and simple  
--- and it doesn't matter if the source program had intricate type  
checks in place as they only have to pass the compiler.
You can read a good low-level overview of the native code the compiler  
outputs here:
http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/performance_and_profiling
(and the rest of the site is an excellent place to get started with  
some simple programs).
Come along to CUFP 2009 in Edinburgh this year and you'll see a really  
vibrant commercial community using FP... and with the heavy MS  
investment in F# (heavily inspired by OCaml); the style of programming  
is really taking off now.  I just bought a copy of "Real World  
Haskell" recently ... you know something's afoot when O'Reilly  
publishes a book with that title and it isn't April 1st :-)
-anil

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Samuel Thibault [mailto:samuel.thibault@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> > Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 3:38 PM
> > To: Dan Magenheimer
> > Cc: xen-devel; Patrick Colp; Alex Zeffertt; George S. Coker,
> > II; Samuel
> > Thibault
> > Subject: Re: ocaml?? why?? (was: [Xen-devel] caml stubdom crashes)
> >
> >
> > Dan Magenheimer, le Thu 02 Apr 2009 12:39:04 -0700, a écrit :
> > > In other words, it may be a very fine academic/research
> > > language... but do we really want enterprise customers'
> > > critical workloads dependent on it?
> > They already do: XenEnterprise is mostly implemented in ocaml.  No
> > problem so far with the language itself.  Personally, the
> > fact that the
> > ocaml compiler is itself written in ocaml (typesafe blablabla
> > language)
> > makes me trust it more that any gcc compiler.
> >
> > Samuel
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> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel

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