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ErlOCaml

ErlOCaml, a "tight bridge between Erlang and OCaml".

Found this mentioned in the "Erlang and OCaml" talk in the proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop 2007.

As the talk-slides say, there is "No particular progress yet", but it is an interesting idea.
Here is the first slide:

Why???

  • Erlang is very good at concurrency
  • Not so good at raw sequential processing
  • Strong momentum in systems programming
  • OCaml has a reputation for speed
  • No particular momentum in concurrency programming
  • We should try to lower the barriers between different FP languages

By dbfaken at 2007-10-19 13:33 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 10521 reads

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Good idea!

That certainly marries two functional programming languages that have orthogonal merits.

By jdh30 at Sun, 2007-11-11 15:33 | login or register to post comments

lack of time...

...is the main impediment to progress right now.
The ErlOcaml google group has a number of members who
are excited about the idea, but all are too busy to
make anything happen. If anyone wants to contribute,
the cheerleading section is eager to support you. (:

By Ulf Wiger at Wed, 2007-11-14 10:58 | login or register to post comments

ML + Erlang

Sounds like Concurrent ML. Both MLton and SML/NJ provide it.

By Vesa Karvonen at Thu, 2007-11-15 14:43 | login or register to post comments

a bit too simplistic

Read Erlang/OTP + OCaml
Erlang/OTP is not just the language Erlang. It's a fairly large collection of libraries for building commercial high-availability applications.

People choose Erlang/OTP for various reasons, not least because it has a good user base with tons of collective experience writing hardcore business applications in areas like telecoms and banking, and because it has earned a reputation of being quite mature and extremely stable.

Once in a while these people write low-level stuff in C. We want to explore the possibility of writing low-level code in an Erlang similar to Erlang, but with more focus on speed and type safety, which is just what one wants in these situations.

It may well be that this triggers some people to look at ML, who'd never consider it otherwise.

By Ulf Wiger at Thu, 2007-11-15 16:57 | login or register to post comments