SMLtoJs – A Standard ML to JavaScript Compiler (2008)

http://www.smlserver.org/smltojs/

by networked • 11 years ago

42 10 11 years ago

seliopou• 11 years ago

There is also a compiler for OCaml bytecode to JavaScript, called js_of_ocaml[0]. It's been around for a while, but I've only recently started using it. It's got a pretty good FFI, and makes futures-based programming via lwt[1] very convenient.

[0] http://ocsigen.org/js_of_ocaml/

[1] http://ocsigen.org/lwt/

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

A similar, more mature & full-featured, approach. Has the power of the Ocaml community going for it. Quite the head start. :)

birdsbolt• 11 years ago

There's also a compiler for Haskell to JavaScript called GHCJS[0]. Many of Haskell libraries can be compiled easily. I think someone compiled Pandoc directly to JS and made a web interface and bundled the app[2].

One interesting things besides web that people have been doing with it is writing Atom editor plugins[1].

[0] https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs

[1] http://edsko.net/2015/02/14/atom-haskell/

[2] http://markup.rocks/

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

This will help in the battle to verify correctness or security of client-side code. Pre-existing tools and code supporting that for ML can be applied immediately. Covert channels & information flow are getting more mainstream attention in recent years. Might work those issues out with Flow Caml, recode equivalent in this, and compile to JS. Would need an analysis on the JS code & runtime itself, though.

I mainly see it useful for what ML is always good at: developer tools. ML has been used to write many robust tools offline. There are also many tools hosted online or in a browser. Might be a step toward (a) moving existing tools online for easy experimentation and (b) deploying new ones.

CHY8723• 11 years ago

In what situation might you use this instead of ocaml? There are a lot of drawbacks of using Standard ML in general, so I'd be interested in seeing if there are any advantages at all.

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

A lot of academic tools in verification and one in covert channel analysis are specific to SML. Such things might make me use this instead of Ocaml if SML's libraries improved to a similar level. For right now, I'd stick with Ocaml.

SMLtoJs – A Standard ML to JavaScript Compiler (2008)

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