Re: Portability of applications written in OCAML

From: skaller (skaller@maxtal.com.au)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2000 - 09:05:41 MET

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    Claude Marche wrote:
    > Pour résumer mon propos, voici donc les questions que je me pose :
    []
    > another application doing the same thing but easier to install.

     
    > If this is technically feasible, I would like to know people who are
    > interested in using this for distribution of their own application in
    > bytecode form.

    > Any comments, remarks and suggestions will be welcome. My goal is be
    > able to distribute as widely as possible an application written in
    > Ocaml, avoiding remarks like ``I'm interested in this application but
    > I cannot compile Ocaml sources, and you do not offer a suitable binary
    > for my configuration », and I would be glad to hear any suggestion for
    > achieving this goal.

    I believe one fundamental obstacle to configuring ocaml is the lack of
    dynamic loading.
    Ideally, it should be possible for ocamlopt to build 'extensions' to the
    bytecode
    interpreter, efficively doing '-custom' linkage at load time.

    The reason this is necessary is that if you have multiple ocaml
    applications,
    you may not want a special 'run time' for each one: each application
    might
    use the core, and a single separate extension module.

    I have no idea how to implement this. However, one of the things that
    you can do -- albiet clumbsily -- in python, is generate C code,
    run the compiler, and then load the resulting shared library as a python
    extension module.

    -- 
    John (Max) Skaller, mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au
    10/1 Toxteth Rd Glebe NSW 2037 Australia voice: 61-2-9660-0850
    homepage: http://www.maxtal.com.au/~skaller
    download: ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu/au/jskaller
    



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