> Putting aside the obvious cultural resistance to using a sensible
> language for this project, there is one technical hurdle: It needs to
> compile into a DLL which can be linked to other programs (in C and
> other languages).  I can't generate such code using ocamlopt, at least
> not without using unsupported out-of-tree extensions.
>
I don't think this is a real hurdle to general adoption of a language.
After all, Java and C# aren't intended to be used like that, yet they
certainly have wide-spread adoption.

I suppose there is gcj for Java, but that's not in 99+% of Java
development, and I'm not sure that will give you a lib at the end of the
day.  I don't know of an equivalent for that in C# -- in all the C#
development I've done, we've never even considered it.

~~ Robert.

-----Original Message-----
From: caml-list-bounces@yquem.inria.fr
[mailto:caml-list-bounces@yquem.inria.fr]On Behalf Of Richard Jones
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 3:17 PM
To: Jim Miller
Cc: caml-list@inria.fr; skaller
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Interactive technical computing


On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 10:36:18PM -0500, Jim Miller wrote:
> What's I think is the interesting point about this discussion is "What
are
> the hurdles toward acceptance of any new language, scripting or not,
into a
> given community?"  Obviously OCAML and the ML languages have deeply
> penetrated some markets but haven't even dented others.  There have
been
> lots of papers, studies, and discussion written on this (
> lambda-the-ultimate.org has many of them archived) so that's probably
> something for a different thread to be read wearing flame-retardant
> underthings.

I'm currently contributing to a 45KLOC C library which I'm sure would
be about 10 times smaller if written in a reasonable language.

Putting aside the obvious cultural resistance to using a sensible
language for this project, there is one technical hurdle: It needs to
compile into a DLL which can be linked to other programs (in C and
other languages).  I can't generate such code using ocamlopt, at least
not without using unsupported out-of-tree extensions.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat

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