Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Advancements

[Nicolas C. <war...@fr...>]

> - bitset is being rewritten into bitarray, with the new features suggested
> by the change in name.  The goal is to produce something you could write
> elliptic curve cryptosystems in at least semi-efficiently.

Nice !

> - I have the beginings of what I'm currently calling an XString library,
> which stores a string as an unbalanced tree of of substrings.  The big
> advantage here is that concats are O(1), and then converting the XString
> to a normal string is O(n).  In-place modification won't be supported.
> This will be usefull in constructing strings by concating substrings
> efficiently.  Sort of like Java's StringBuffer.

Very good also, but what then does not call it StringBuffer ?
The name came by itself, so... :)

> - A resizable array module- rather like Java's Vector or Python's List.

Yes we realy need this Vector one

> Life has been rather hectic of late for me- sorry I haven't been more
> timely on this.  But this weekend is looking dull, so I should be able to
> spend some serious coding time.

Yes, I would like to apologize for my previous post, and after some
thinking, I think now we're walking the good way, and we have no need to
hurry more. I'm currently still working on the List implementation... okay ,
some words about it : I'm currently at Kyoto, and having everyday at lunch
some ocaml-talks with Jacques Garrigue, and when I told him about this
setcdr trick, is first reaction was that it would be nice but perhaps there
is some GC issues since that can create pointers from the major to the minor
heap, and then causing speed overhead. Right now I'm aiming at tricking the
compiler with mutable structures , with the goal to have at least the
ExtList.map speed be as good as the ExtList.map one.
Even if I don't manage to do it, I will move the non-tails functions
List.map , List.fold_right, etc. into a "Fast" ExtList sub-module ( I'll
test for speed only for native code version under Windows OCaml/VC++, since
when you compile to bytecode you not care so much about speed, and since I
don't have access to other platforms right now - I'll post here the test
samples and results to know about other platforms speeds )

> Longer term, libraries I'd like (and that I think would be usefull) would
> include:
>
> - A BLAS-like library.  Although I need to think about this design some-
> OOLALA has shown me that BLAS itself is probably not the best overall
> library design.
>
> - A regular expressions library- although I think this might already be
> out there.
>
> - An elliptic curve crypto systems library.

Except the reg expr library ( and the new Regexp is the third one after the
Str module and PCRE ) I can't tell theses could be massively used enough to
be included in the ExtLib :)
Keep going on !

Nicolas Cannasse