Comparing Standard ML and OCaml

http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/

by rohshall • 14 years ago

86 20 14 years ago

adam.chlipala.net

beering• 14 years ago

Nothing said about multithreading and parallel processing? Seems like a big omission if you're comparing languages.

dons• 14 years ago

The reason is that neither OCaml nor SML support language-level parallelism or concurrency.

These features are /somewhat/ available as 3rd party libs (OCaml), but you won't see GHC or Erlang-style thread use.

Altenuvian• 14 years ago

there were some attempts to include multithreading into standard ml. john reppy's manticore project came quite far but wasn't fully implemented.

currently mythryl, a sml/nj derivative with c-flavored syntax, is about to get a full multithreading support. check out mythryl.org and the status updates on the mailing list.

rwmj2• 14 years ago

The user group explicitly rejected multithreading at the OCaml Users conference a couple of years back. (There was a working implementation called oc4mc).

The reasons were that it will slow down single-threaded performance, and threads as a programming model is not robust (compared to, eg. forking, message passing, MPI etc). Also actual graphs of 4- and 8-way SMP performance showed pretty poor scaling for real problems, so the benefits aren't that great compared to going for full MPI, which you have to do for NUMA anyhow.

scott_s• 14 years ago

Also actual graphs of 4- and 8-way SMP performance showed pretty poor scaling for real problems

Do you mean for OCaml, or in general? Because lots of problems are amenable to 4 and 8 way threading on SMPs or multicores.

Evbn• 14 years ago

GHC has a compiler flag to enable multi threaded runtime. Why can't OCaml have that? It is a bit rigid to have to build two versions of a binary, but for folks who run their own code, no problem at all.

jackfoxy3• 14 years ago

F# is practically OCaml, from my understanding. I don't know if it has all the same current .NET multithreading support under Mono. Worth looking into.

pjmlp2• 14 years ago

I have adopted it as my main scripting language when doing Windows projects. :)

iskander• 14 years ago

They really diverge when it comes to more advanced language features. I make heavy use of functors in my code and my (possibly mistaken) understanding is that F# simply doesn't support them. Ditto for first-class modules, polymorphic variants, GADTs, and OCaml's object system. Of course, in exchange for a wimpier core, F# gives you a lot of convenient polish and proper support for parallelism & concurrency.

gtani• 14 years ago

this was Leroy's post in 2002 about multithreaded runtimes

http://web.archive.org/web/20110724004117/http://caml.inria....

Here are recent commentaries:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1302272/is-inria-going-to...

http://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/xxxn4/interesting_dev...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10705526/is-there-a-surve...

Wilya• 14 years ago

Regarding build systems, ocamlbuild is included with the standard ocaml distribution and gives a high-level interface that is much simpler to use than ocamldep and friends. Especially when combined with findlib.

nrlucas2• 14 years ago

Yeah, this is really old. I remember seeing it six years ago when I started using OCaml.

batgaijin• 14 years ago

Urgh! I want to see Jocaml posts around here!

Comparing Standard ML and OCaml

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