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0 pointschriswarbo11y ago0 comments

Interesting. Maybe an area where linear types can shine?

Rust is probably the most trendy language offering linear types at the moment, although I'd say it much closer to being "a safer C" than "a linear OCaml", so it wouldn't really make things more functional (although it would be safer!).

ATS is descended from DependentML, but for some reason most ATS code I've seen is written in a "safer C" style too. Maybe that's just pragmatism, since ATS has very few native libraries, so it's usually easier to call out to C.

Linear Lisp might be a nice choice, but its dynamic typing may be a problem for security-critical code.

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steveklabnik11y ago

Fun bit of trivia: Rust was originally implemented _in_ OCaml, and takes a lot of cues from it.

klibertp11y ago

I saw a bit of OCaml code in Rust code-base recently, can you say what it's used for? I know that Rust is self-hosting now, but I swear I saw some .ml files there...

dbaupp11y ago

  ~/rust $ find -name '*.ml' | wc -l
  72
  ~/rust $ find -name '*.ml' | grep -v ./src/llvm | wc -l
  0

i.e. there are some OCaml files in a Rust checkout, but they're all part of LLVM, mostly part of the "OCaml Kaleidoscope": http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/OCamlLangImpl1.html

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