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[Xen-devel] Re: ocaml?? why??

To: John Levon <levon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Xen-devel] Re: ocaml?? why??
From: Vincent Hanquez <vincent.hanquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:51:32 +0100
Cc: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>, xen-devel <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "George S. Coker, II" <gscoker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Patrick Colp <pjcolp@xxxxxxxxx>, Alex Zeffertt <Alex.Zeffertt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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John Levon wrote:
On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 12:39:04PM -0700, Dan Magenheimer wrote:

Why ocaml?  Let me make it clear that I know very little
about ocaml... it may be a perfect match for the job and
the best language since sliced bread, but as far as I can
tell it is NOT A WIDELY DEPLOYED language.  As a result,
the Xen community is going to have to work through all
of the little distro/version-dependent idiosyncracies and

I agree that might well be a concern, but it's not the major one IMHO.
Simply put, the barrier to entry for hacking Xen tools written in ocaml
is much, much higher. Whilst you might be willing to learn a new
language, most people won't be. Never mind re-learn everything they know
about debugging it[1].

Put another way: xenstored is hardly stretching C's capabilities. xend
is hardly stretching Python's (at least now Twisted isn't used). Where
is the /need/ for a new, little-understood, language to be used?
I understand what you means (audience wise it's true), however i think that's very misleading to say it's a "new/little-understood" language. it's has been around for a while (1996, or 1985 for caml light), even more considering that the language is a variant of ML (1973). python is 1991 FTR.
I also find it a little difficult to believe that xenstored-C's
purported defects couldn't have been fixed, and required a total
rewrite.
I'm sure the Xen team would be happy to apply your patch on the C version then :-)

OCaml has been great to use. Programming the same functional tree store with advanced transaction merging capability in the C version would have been a major pain, compared to how (almost) easy it was in OCaml.

--
Vincent

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