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On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:03:34PM +0200, 'Mr. Herr' [email protected] [ocaml_beginners] wrote:
> Then it excels in systems programming: the Xen hypervisor is written
> in OCaml I think, and work in this direction goes on with Mirage
> (www.openmirage.org/) which will provide OS services for
> applications that run on Xen (one might say a container on
I took a very casual look at some of ite source code, and that part
(qemu) appears to be written in a dialect of C or C++.
Evidently the wrong part.
Would you know just which of xen's components is written in ocaml?
I'm curious, because the low-level delay-sensitive hardware interaction
that things like hypervisors need don't seem to be ocaml's strong
point. Not that I think ocaml is likely to be unsuitable for the
project, but it will likely have to be supplemented with tight
real-time components that are insensitive to garbage collection delays.
Most of serious system programming is not concerned, however with
low-level hardware interaction. The main things you need there are
tools for avoiding bugs. Static typing helps a lot there, and usually
enables a compiler to generate fast code as well.
For my money ($0 because it's all free softwarae) I consider ocaml and
Modula 3 to be wotrhy competitors in the system programmming area.
I believe Modula 3 has been furnished with true multicore parallel
processing by now, though garbage collection requires that all its
processes stop and wait for it.
> steroids).
>
> Do not forget the big banking and trading applications at
> janestreet.com (skipping the typo 'big bang king applications').
Yes, they're real fans of OCaml and Lisp.
>
> And last, but topmost, is the application as language for formal
> proofs, see coq.inria.fr. which is now THE BIG THING in informatics
> trying to prove the correctness of systems. Once they get this to
> work and be practical there will be no more hourly updates for your
> security sensitive OS and applications (and maybe no more of the
> terribly insecure C programming). I won't miss either.
I think this project has in the long term followed the development of
ocaml since at least the days of Caml, if not ML. I suspect the
project would hae been difficult to pursue without such a language.
Perhaps a statically typed version of Lisp would have sufficed, but
that hasn't appeared until very recently.
>
> And one word to your interest in OCaml: the ML / Ocaml languages are
> at the moment the primary source of inspiration for new language
> development, see for example Rust and pattern matching.
There's also new language development based on Lisps, e.g., the familty
of languages based on Racket, a variant of Scheme with many
metaprogramming features.
>
> >2)How is performance of Ocaml compared with C++,Java,Erlang ? I am
> >not asking benchmark figures but in general.
I've used it for a very simple 3D graphics videoo game. It plays
smoothly on a laptop that isn't very good at streaming video in the
browser..
-- hendrik