Ups: Created page with "''MetaOCaml lives on'' by Oleg Kiselyov MetaOCaml is a superset of OCaml extending it with staging annotations to construct and run typed code values. It was originally implemen..."

2013-04-07T19:40:49Z

Created page with "''MetaOCaml lives on'' by Oleg Kiselyov MetaOCaml is a superset of OCaml extending it with staging annotations to construct and run typed code values. It was originally implemen..."

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''MetaOCaml lives on'' by Oleg Kiselyov

MetaOCaml is a superset of OCaml extending it with staging annotations
to construct and run typed code values. It was originally implemented
by Taha, Calcagno and collaborators and was successfully used for
specializing numeric and dynamic programming algorithms, building FFT
kernels, optimizing compilers for DSL for image processing, OCaml
server pages, etc. Unfortunately, due to lack of resources MetaOCaml
fell behind OCaml. The large differences between OCaml and its dialect
has contributed to the difficulty of maintaining MetaOCaml.

This talk reports on the compete re-implementation of MetaOCaml, called
BER MetaOCaml N100. It is a superset of the current 4.001 version of
OCaml. BER MetaOCaml has been re-structured to minimize the number of
changes to the OCaml type-checker and to separate the `kernel'
(type-checking and constructing code values) from the `user-level'.
Various ways of running the code -- compiling to byte-code or machine
instructions and executing them, or translating code values to C or
LLVM, or printing them -- can be done in `user-level' libraries,
without any need to hack into (Meta)OCaml. Maintaining the kernel and
keeping it up to date should be much easier now. Also easier should be
contributing to MetaOCaml.

We will illustrate a notable new feature: scope extrusion check.
Attempting to build code values with unbound or mistakenly bound
variables (which is possible with mutation or other effects) is now
caught early, raising an exception with good diagnostics.

Active development, new modular structure, new features of MetaOCaml will
hopefully attract more users and contributors, and incite future
research into type-safe meta-programming.

WG211/M12Kiselyov - Revision history

Ups: Created page with "''MetaOCaml lives on'' by Oleg Kiselyov MetaOCaml is a superset of OCaml extending it with staging annotations to construct and run typed code values. It was originally implemen..."