On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 04:21:16PM +0100, Richard Jones wrote: > On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 09:07:23PM +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > > Florian Hars wrote: > > > > > Erik de Castro Lopo schrieb: > > > > That makes sense. I do quite low level stuff as well, even Linux device > > > > drivers and that is not ever going to be done in Ocaml or Haskell :-). > > > > > > People do use Haskell in developing OS kernels, and you can't get more > > > low-level than that: > > > > > > http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/approach.pml > > > > The Linux kernel which is the one I am interested in is C only. For > > the Linux kernel I very much doubt it is ever going to be possible to > > write drivers in Ocaml or Haskell even if that is possible for other > > kernels now. > > Kernel hackers would hate people using any language other than C for > Linux kernel modules. But that doesn't mean a modified OCaml is a bad > choice for writing a kernel. > > It's relatively low-level when you need it to be, and it wouldn't be > too much work to separate out the runtime and reimplement it on top of > baremetal. It would also be interesting to see if the supposed > massive overheads of garbage collection are in reality better than > bloating every structure with an additional reference count field. > > There are some missing features to really make it possible though: > > - inline assembly > > - support for ELF (eg. putting code/data directly into named sections) > > - bit fields / bit twiddling (can probably be done with macros) > > - better optimization of int32 and int64 types > > Of the above, inline assembly is the one I'd really like to see added > to OCaml. And having int32 be optimized to an int on 64 bit > platforms. > > Rich.
two interesting projects in that direction: c-- (cminusminus) bit-c by jonathan shapiro -- Philippe Strauss http://philou.ch _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
