[Xen-devel] Re: ocaml?? why??

[Vincent Hanquez <vincent.hanquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Levon wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 12:39:04PM -0700, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
>
>   
> > Why ocaml?  Let me make it clear that I know very little
> > about ocaml... it may be a perfect match for the job and
> > the best language since sliced bread, but as far as I can
> > tell it is NOT A WIDELY DEPLOYED language.  As a result,
> > the Xen community is going to have to work through all
> > of the little distro/version-dependent idiosyncracies and
> >     
> I agree that might well be a concern, but it's not the major one IMHO.
> Simply put, the barrier to entry for hacking Xen tools written in ocaml
> is much, much higher. Whilst you might be willing to learn a new
> language, most people won't be. Never mind re-learn everything they know
> about debugging it[1].
>
> Put another way: xenstored is hardly stretching C's capabilities. xend
> is hardly stretching Python's (at least now Twisted isn't used). Where
> is the /need/ for a new, little-understood, language to be used?
>   
I understand what you means (audience wise it's true), however i think 
that's very misleading to say it's a "new/little-understood" language. 
it's has been around for a while (1996, or 1985 for caml light), even 
more considering that the language is a variant of ML (1973). python is 
1991 FTR.
> I also find it a little difficult to believe that xenstored-C's
> purported defects couldn't have been fixed, and required a total
> rewrite.
>   
I'm sure the Xen team would be happy to apply your patch on the C 
version then :-)
OCaml has been great to use. Programming the same functional tree store 
with advanced transaction merging capability in the C version would have 
been a major pain, compared to how (almost) easy it was in OCaml.
--
Vincent

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