[LLVMdev] Improving OCaml bindings

[Sean Silva]

On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 9:04 PM, Peter Zotov <whitequark at whitequark.org>wrote:

> Hello folks.
>
> I'm very interested in improving LLVM's OCaml bindings. I have
> several nontrivial patches sitting on llvm-commits for several
> weeks, and so far there's been little interest in them.
>
> Could someone with a good understanding of OCaml please take
> a look at these?
>
> 1) http://llvm-reviews.chandlerc.com/D1925
>
>    Every other function in OCaml bindings accepts context
>    explicitly, would it be a legitimate change to make existing
>    functions accept it as well? This would break the API.
>

I don't really have a good idea of who uses these OCaml bindings API's. A
good first step is probably to map out the landscape of the users of the
API. Maybe browse research papers? I wouldn't expect to see many OCaml
programs "in production" that depend on this API. Also, I'm not sure if we
have a stated backwards compatibility policy for this API. Ultimately you
probably just want to talk with all the API users you can scrape together.

-- Sean Silva


>
> 2) http://llvm-reviews.chandlerc.com/D1926
>
>    I'd like to add garbage collection support to the API
>    wherever safe, that's at least DataLayout.t and llmemorybuffer.
>    This removes the need for .dispose. I could remove it and break
>    the API or print a warning at runtime.
>
> 3) http://llvm-reviews.chandlerc.com/D1927
>
>    In order to allow code generation from OCaml, I need to build
>    a stub library per configured target. I'm not sure how to
>    integrate it with LLVM's build system; my current solution seems
>    very ad-hoc.
>
>    I will update the patch to use Dynlink interface (this is the
>    textbook use case for Dynlink), but conceptually this doesn't
>    change the problem of interfacing with build system.
>
> --
>   WBR, Peter Zotov.
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