sutton036

Alp Mestan has begun work on the first front-end for HLVM. This project has many important goals: Provide a high-level language that HLVM developers can write test code, benchmarks and garbage collectors in. Serve as a tutorial for the people porting existing compilers such as Moscow ML, NekoML and PolyML to HLVM. Track new features as they are added to HLVM, such as closures, parametric polymorphism, parallelism and so on. Alp intends to apply to Jane St. Capital to fund a summer project that will port the entire OCaml compiler to HLVM.

Microsoft's Common Language Run-time (CLR) was a fantastic idea. The ability to interoperate safely and at a high-level between different languages, from managed C++ to F#, has greatly accelerated development on the Microsoft platform. The resulting libraries, like Windows Presentation Foundation, are already a generation ahead of anything available on any other platform. Linux and Mac OS X do not currently have the luxury of a solid foundation like the CLR. Consequently, they are composed entirely from uninteroperable components written in independent languages, from unmanaged custom C++ dialects to Objective C and Python. Some developers choose to restrict themselves to the lowest common denominator (e.g. writing GTK in C) which aids interoperability but only at a grave cost in productivity. Other developers gravitate to huge libraries written in custom dialects of particularly uninteroperable languages (e.g. Qt). Both approaches have a bleak future. The situation is compounded b...