Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Future of ExtLib

[Sylvain LE G. <syl...@po...>]

Hello,

On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 04:00:37PM -0500, Brian Hurt wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Apr 2004 syl...@po... wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Even if i am not an Extlib developper, i permit myself to raise my
> > voice... Sorry if you don't agree.
> 
> IMHO, If you're an Extlib user, you have the right to a voice here.
> 

Thanks ;-)

> > 
> > I think extlib is a great project by the 100% Pure Ocaml coding style. I
> > think putting 1 byte of C in it is not a good idea. It will break a lot
> > of things, need to be maintained over a lot of arch ( including Ms Win,
> > Linux, Unix, Irix et al ). I think it is far too complicated to be
> > interessant.
> 
> Actually, writting portable C isn't the problem.  I routinely write C code 
> which is much more widely portable than Ocaml is.  
> 

Well, most of the time, porting from BE to LEndian and trading with
different int size is a great problem ( for me at least ). You need a
lot of #define #ifdef... I don't like this... Test coverage for code is
enough difficult. Adding compile time condition give you more code to
test...

> But the more I think about it, the more I think linking to external 
> libraries has other problems.  For example, zlib and gmp both are 
> standard installs on Linux systems.  They both exist for Windows, but are 
> not part of the standard installs.  So now, to use extlib on windows, you 
> now not only need to get ocaml and extlib, but also zlib and gmp.  Plus, 
> the code I'm thinking of grabbing for symmetric key crypto aren't 
> standardly packaged in any library I'm aware of.  How we connect to this 
> code is almost irrelevent, the code still needs to be there.
> 

I agree...

The idea of having zlib, encryption is good but i think it should be not
part of extlib.

Kind regard
Sylvain Le Gall

ps : do you plan to use cryptokit and cryptgps for your library ?