3 ms·

what is it about OCaml that makes it popular as a first stage in implementing new languages and/or compilers? also... > and eventually we hope to hook into OC

• kryptiskt 8y ago
  Algebraic data structures are really nice for representing ASTs and intermediate languages. And a compiler lends itself very well to functional programming, because what you ultimately want is just a function that takes the input code and produces the output code.
• e12e 8y ago
  As Wikipedia says of ml (meta language) languages in general: "Its types and pattern matching make it well-suited and commonly used to operate on other formal languages, such as in compiler writing, automated theorem proving and formal verification." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)
• a0 8y ago
  WASM currently does not have a GC but that's precisely why one is needed. Languages that target WASM need to implement their own GC but there's already a proposal to integrate a GC implementation into WASM[1]. [1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/Overview.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...
• tomp 8y ago
  It's an extremely high-level language that compiles to extremely low-level fast code (except GC).