I have looked over the archives and I have seen there has been a fair 
amount of discussion on compiling O'Caml to JVM bytecode or the .NET 
intermediate language. The primary advantage cited seems to be reuse of 
.NET and J2SE/J2EE libraries. People have said that compiling O'Caml to 
JVM/.NET is difficult because of mismatches in the .NET/JVM object model 
and the O'Caml object model.

But, would it be easier to reuse Java libraries by:
   * extending the O'Caml runtime to be able to interpret JVM bytecodes
     (i.e. be able to dynamically link to *.class and *.jar files), or
   * cross-compiling JVM bytecode into O'Caml bytecode, or
   * compiling Java source code into O'Caml bytecode

Similar questions apply for .NET, of course.

I would like to do more programming in O'Caml but it is sometimes 
difficult to choose O'Caml over Java when there are _so_ many libraries 
available for Java, with more added seemingly every day.

Thanks,
Brian

Don Syme wrote:
 > I chose to implement a core Caml compiler for .NET partly to test out
 > generics, but also because I want to be able to program against .NET
 > libraries using the language I love to program in, and reuse the
 > libraries and techniques I've developed.  I guess it's possible I'll
 > get a bit of flak from the Caml community about F#.

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