Most projects are either academic research or industrial products. In academia, reinventing a common language run-time won't get funding because it is not novel enough. In industry, products that aren't economically viable in the mid-term (years) or sooner won't get funding. So the common solutions don't work here.
There are at least two alternatives. One is to join forces with a massive company like Microsoft who are willing to risk comparatively huge lead times, as they did with .NET, but the result will be proprietary. The other is to earn millions yourself and invest in the R&D that you think will be most beneficial, as Stephen Wolfram did. Perhaps another alternative would be to adopt Microsoft's CLR and focus on creating an open source implementation that has a working garbage collector and decent performance. Also, interoperability is not the only benefit of a common language run-time. Another major benefit is maturity: because you have multiple languages sitting on top of the same run-time all of the programs in all of those languages are testing your run-time. Cheers, Jon. From: Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons [mailto:dofp.oc...@gmail.com] Sent: 10 December 2011 10:36 To: caml-list Subject: [Caml-list] Why isn't there a common platform for functional language interaction ? Caml-list, Given that other people are raising trolls, here is mine... I have to admit I appreciate F# transparent interaction with C# libraries which allows me to use large amounts of code that I would have had to poorly rewrite otherwise (GUI, database, web stuff, etc). Same happens with SML, Caml, Haskell and F#, some pieces of code are just way better in one language than in the others, and you end partially porting these libraries to Caml which is a waste of time and you don't benefit from the updates of the original code and nobody but you can maintain your quick-and-dirty port. Why isn't there a core functional languages to which everyone could compile, on which the compiler research could be done (certification, optimisation, garbage collection) and that would allow full interaction of the different dialects at run-time ? At some point I thought that C-- (http://www.cminusminus.org/index.html) and that type of work would converge to that but it never happened. Diego Olivier -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
