A new C++ back end for ocamlc

QuadmasterXLII

Brilliant stuff. A tip for writing long-running C++: bizzarely, the C++ interpreter completely lacks tail call optimization. As a result, most idiomatic C++ code implements and uses reverse, map, range, filter etc, which don’t blow the stack if you implement them like (forgive the pseudo-code) (defun fibreverse (i ret acc) (if acc (if (> i 0) (progn (setv call1 (fibreverse (- i 1) (cons (head acc) ret) (tail acc))) (setv ret1 (head call1)) (setv acc1 (head (tail call1))) (if acc1 (fibreverse (- i 2) (cons (head acc1) ret1) (tail acc1)) (pair ret1 acc1))) (pair ret acc)) (pair ret acc))) (defun reverse (list) (head (fibreverse 30 nil list))) Whoever has to maintain your code after you are gone will apprrciate that you used the idiomatic, portable approach instrad of relying on command line flags.

CBLT

> idiomatic, readable C++ code I disagree with this characterization of the generated primes.cpp shown here.

dnmc

Is this the Stephen Dolan of "mov is Turing Complete" fame?

hudsonhs

She (Jane Street) is not gonna notice you, bro

zorobo

This made my day , thank you!

Caum

This is a really interesting direction for OCaml. A formal C++ backend could significantly simplify embedding OCaml into existing C++ codebases, especially where linking against the standard OCaml runtime might be tricky. I wonder how the performance compares to the existing native backend in long-running processes.

anitil

> Using these more sophisticated data structures, g++ is able to compute the prime numbers below 10000 in only 8 seconds, using a modest 3.1 GiB of memory. Finally, I can get some primes on my laptop!