ocaml-lib-devel

[Ocaml-lib-devel] Tips on integrating ocaml-lib with the ocaml stdlib?

[Jonathan R. <jon...@gm...>]

Hi,

I'm doing an OS project, and I want to make a custom ocaml environment
where the ExtLib modules are integrated to be part of the OCaml
standard library.

I plan on going so far as to remove pervasives.out_channel/in_channel,
among other things, and using the IO module exclusively.

If anyone could provide some helpful suggestions on how best to go
about this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Jonathan

Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Tips on integrating ocaml-lib with the ocaml stdlib?

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

>  Hi,
>
> I'm doing an OS project, and I want to make a custom ocaml environment
> where the ExtLib modules are integrated to be part of the OCaml
> standard library.
>
> I plan on going so far as to remove pervasives.out_channel/in_channel,
> among other things, and using the IO module exclusively.
>
> If anyone could provide some helpful suggestions on how best to go
> about this, it would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Jonathan

That's interesting idea, could you give more informations about the goal of
your project ?

Actually you just need to declare in IO.ml the C externals to caml channels
functions and hide them in the mli so they can't be used directly. Have a
look at pervasives.ml and .mli sources to see how ocaml is doing.

Nicolas

Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Tips on integrating ocaml-lib with the ocaml stdlib?

[Jonathan R. <jon...@gm...>]

> That's interesting idea, could you give more informations about the goal =
of
> your project ?

To write a robust, type-safe OS.

> Actually you just need to declare in IO.ml the C externals to caml channe=
ls
> functions and hide them in the mli so they can't be used directly. Have a
> look at pervasives.ml and .mli sources to see how ocaml is doing.

I'd prefer to get rid of the channels completely (as well as
printf/fprintf, use of file descriptors, probably other things too),
to avoid writing a lot of libc stub code.

Jonathan

Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Tips on integrating ocaml-lib with the ocaml stdlib?

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

> > That's interesting idea, could you give more informations about the goal
of
> > your project ?
>
> To write a robust, type-safe OS.
>
> > Actually you just need to declare in IO.ml the C externals to caml
channels
> > functions and hide them in the mli so they can't be used directly. Have
a
> > look at pervasives.ml and .mli sources to see how ocaml is doing.
>
> I'd prefer to get rid of the channels completely (as well as
> printf/fprintf, use of file descriptors, probably other things too),
> to avoid writing a lot of libc stub code.
>

Then you need to write  :

external open_file : string -> bin:bool -> IO.input = "camlos_open_file"

for example, and generate an input from this on the C side.
That's quite tricky because You'll have to :
a) know about IO.input structure on the C side ( order of record fields )
b) create closures in C using caml API : not very easy.
You should really consider the approach of having  file_channel primitives
in IO.ml for internal usage only.

Nicolas