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

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

Hello,

On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 11:00:34PM +0200, Nicolas Cannasse 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.
> 
> Same opinion here.
> 
> > > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> 
> As I told you : you don't need to have the libs installed to compile stubs.
> Now if you want to use the features that are needind the libs, you only need
> to have the dynamic library in your path so that EmuC can find it. All
> linking is done dynamicly at runtime. As for the zlib - and many other
> libraries - there is always some binary available for windows, because we -
> windows programmers - are known to be not clever enough to rebuild from a
> Makefile :-)
> 

Yep... But i think it could be achieve by doing an external module... It
has three benefits :
- don't imply C code in extlib
- don't imply dependency on external library
- is a good example to know if you can let people build their own
  external module for extlib ( ie by this way you can test the
  completeness of the interface given to external people to build things
  with extlib ).

> To answer to Sylvain, crypto was just an example of external library, I'm
> not sure it should be part of ExtLib (or maybe only the MD5 - useful enough
> to be standard : anyone contributing ? ).
> 

INRIA has already contribut to this ;-)

( Hash of string are MD5 sums, cryptokit use it directly, cryptokit has
already a MD5 module )

Regard
Sylvain Le Gall