alt Hacker NewsNice work! Did you ever open any open source any of it? Looking at your OCaml wishlist from back in 2017, some stuff has improved and some is on its way:
- Support for read-only BigArrays (or sections) : we're starting to switch to just using bytes/string in OCaml 5+ now, since the larger allocations go into malloc'ed pools and do not relocate, so they can be used as part of an FFI (without the Bigarray C value overhead)
- More support for floating-point numbers (exceptions, representation exploration): OxCaml has some of this now! https://oxcaml.org/documentation/miscellaneous-extensions/sm...
- Syntax for extended BigArray indexing: now supported in OCaml https://ocaml.org/manual/5.4/indexops.html#ss:multiindexing
- LaCaml remains too low-level (non-functional) and unreadable: still remains the case, but OxCaml's got initial support for SIMD https://oxcaml.org/documentation/simd/intro
- BigArray and floating-point I/O remains difficult (we would like: I/O to channels, efficient representation retrieval): much easier now with OCaml effects to build custom fast serialisers (see https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/eio)
- Native top-level: ocamlnat is (I think) shipped in OxCaml, but you can also run a wasm toplevel
Thanks. Regarding open-sourcing, well no, it's not up to me, and it would be kind of proprietary.
The size variants for floats and integers is definitely appreciated.
For the "read-only BigArrays": At the time I didn't know any Rust, but today that would simply be passing a mutable or immutable reference. Similar to the Fortran in/out designators in some way. I think that's pretty important when you have some complicated numerical code, sometimes with in-place modification.
Since there is a "zero_alloc checker", maybe a similar kind of annotation exists or could be added? Something like