On Friday 09 May 2008, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 07:09:57PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > F# has long since overtaken all other functional languages in terms of
> > industrial uptake and I have not heard that complaint from anyone. Like
> > OCaml, it follows simple rules and is predictable as a consequence.
>
> Figures to back up this extraordinary claim?  (And I don't mean the
> unverifiable figures of a certain Cambridge-based consultancy).
>
> These commercial enterprises better hope they don't need to modify the
> F# compiler at all, and that MS keep releasing new versions and fixes
> forever, because the terms of the F# license would prevent them from
> fixing it themselves (unlike if they'd decided to go with an open
> source solution).

Availability of source code enables that, but is not a guarantee that a fix 
will be forthcoming or economical. Gcc codebase is all for us to see, yet it 
would require either a genius or lots of time for the ordinary ones among us 
to get to speed to work with it in general. I've attempted it 2-3 times, and 
I gave up after a while (just wrapping your mind around gas's borkedness can 
be revolting), even though I have no problem understanding most of the 
concepts involved; I maintain a proprietary, half-assed, just-good-enough 
implementation of a nonconforming Lisp which produces MCU (eZ8 and 12 bit 
pic) assembly on par with what I can write myself, mostly. But it's written 
in Lisp too, and while I could probably port it to C, I could never develop 
it in C (it'd degenerate in a way which makes gcc code look stellar). So even 
if you do have knowledge in the field, but no first-hand exposure to 
braindamage involved with writing (and maintaining) a compiler of any sort in 
a low level lanugage like C, you might as well have no access to the source 
code -- it won't help much beyond simple recompilation or minor patches 
needed to have the code compile on a newer revision of the host platform (say 
newer Linux distro).

Cheers, Kuba