On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Eric Dahlman wrote:

> John J Lee wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Brian Hurt wrote:
> >>Currying, exceptions, etc. also have small size penalties.
> > OK.  I'm now enlightened on that point -- clearly, O'Caml's runtime is an
> > absolute requirement for an O'Caml program (unlike C/C++).
>
> C and C++ are not special in this regard, they just happen to be shipped
> with the operating system.  On my box hello world links against  libc.so
> and ld.so which are 1,531,964 and 103,044 bytes respectively.
[...]

I don't understand what this has to do with what I said in the quote.
Yes, C runtime is present on essentially all systems, but the point is
that C and O'Caml are fundamentally different: with C, you can *ignore*
that runtime, and write a program that simply doesn't use it at all.  Not
so with O'Caml (for perfectly good and sensible reasons).

> One way to even things up is require the C version to link to all of its
[...]

Also, I'm simply looking for a way to distribute code, not trying to start
a pissing contest between C and O'Caml :-) so I'm not interested in
"evening things up".


> Really what you need to do is lobby Microsoft and Apple to include ocaml
> as part of the base system install and then things might even out ;-)

Well, I guess they already have, in the sense that O'Caml has a .NET
implementation -- right?  Always assuming that implementation is more than
the publicity stunt that the Python one was, of course...


John

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