Hi! I've been trying to port the debian package mlton to PowerPC. MLton is a whole-program optimizing compiler for Standard ML.
Standard ML is a modern programming language with type-inference, polymorphism, garbage collection, pattern matching, higher-order functions, modules, and functors. (All of which are cool imo :-) Tutorials: http://mlton.org/StandardMLBooks http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/stg/NOTES/ http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/course-notes/sml/manual.html Performance: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&sort=cpu The problem is that debian powerpc autobuilder, voltaire, has 320MB of RAM. If you read http://mlton.org/SelfCompiling you will see that a build needs 512MB. Swap is no substitute for RAM with this build! A build on one of my machines did not terminate after two days with 256MB of RAM, but completed in 10 minutes with 1GB. I find it very surprising that voltaire has so little memory since I imagine most modern PPCs have much more than this, and RAM is very inexpensive these days. Naturally, in order for debian PowerPC to benefit from any future Standard ML programs targetting MLton, MLton must be ported to debian PowerPC. I've had no trouble cross-compiling the compiler to voltaire, but when I try to build it natively (or if the autobuilder were to try) the system chokes. I waited about 10 hours for it to terminate and it made no progress. Christmas is coming around and I wonder if maybe voltaire deserves a new, shiny RAM chip in its stocking? =) -- Wesley W. Terpstra
