Romain Beauxis <toots@rastageeks.org> writes:

> 	Hi !
>
> Le Thursday 16 April 2009 14:15:40 Yoann Padioleau, vous avez écrit :
>> Sexplib and binprot by Jane Street are attractive, but they rely on
>> camlp4. I don't like camlp4. I like the metaprogramming facility it
>> offers but it has many disadvantages. So I've found a in-the-middle
>> solution where I use camlp4 to generate code (via the small script
>> ocamltarzan.ml), save the generated code in a file (e.g
>> test/foo_sexp.ml), which allows then to completely remove the
>> dependency to camlp4. Once the code has been generated, all
>> dependencies to camlp4 can be removed. If tomorrow an incompatible new
>> version of camlp4 arrives (e.g. camlp6 ...), your code will still
>> work, because it does not rely on the new behavior of this camlp4.
>> It's just regular plain good ocaml code.
>
> Shouldn't this just be a software/script independant from sexplib ?

It should, but the goal is to make it easier to use sexplib, and I've
found sexplib as it is right now a little bit complex to compile
(it requires ocamlfind, it requires type-conv, etc) by
default and too much tied to camlp4, hence the fork.

>
> On the one hand, such a technique could be useful for other code using other 
> camlp4 extensions, 

It's useful only for boilerplate related camlp4 extensions, and
except sexplib/binprot I don't know other such extensions.

> and on the other hand, this would avoid yet another fork...

sexplib has already been forked ?

>
>
> Romain
>
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