[cwn] Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News

Alan Schmitt alan.schmitt at polytechnique.org
Tue Dec 20 02:55:28 PST 2005 

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of 13 to 20  
December, 2005.

Joyeux Noël !

1) Weblogs and HostIP modules
2) Concurrent and Distributed Programming in Ocaml
3) Generic access to float arrays

========================================================================
1) Weblogs and HostIP modules
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31762>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Richard Jones announced:

I'm pleased to announce that we have "liberated" another two modules
which we use internally.

Weblogs
-------

A module for importing web logfiles from Apache or IIS web servers and
doing simple analysis on them.

License: LGPL + OCaml linking exception

<http://merjis.com/developers/weblogs>
<http://resources.merjis.com/developers/weblogs/Weblogs.html>

HostIP
------

HostIP is an OCaml module for looking up geolocation data from IP
addresses. It uses the community HostIP.info project API.

License: LGPL + OCaml linking exception

<http://merjis.com/developers/hostip>
<http://resources.merjis.com/developers/hostip/HostIP.html>
<http://hostip.info/>

========================================================================
2) Concurrent and Distributed Programming in Ocaml
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31781>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Alexsandro Soares asked:

    My team is working with evolutionary computing and
we develop a distributed model of gene expression
programming (GEP) in OCaml. Our first try used the
primitives provided in modules Mutex and Condition to
do syncronization between process and threads. The
system is done. However, we will make a refactoring of
the code and, at this time,  we would like to use
higher level constructs to work with concurrent and
distributed programming. What are the options to do
this in OCaml? We started to see Jocaml, but our
system uses native code generation both in Linux and
Windows, and I don't know if Jocaml can be compiled in
native code. Any help?

** Vincenzo Ciancia suggested:

I would recommend trying the Event module which features channels and
events, which in turn are an abstraction which allows to build more  
complex
events from simpler ones before "synchronizing" on the resulting event.

For example, "receive a" is the event that, when you synchronize to it,
waits for a value to be sent on channel "a", and returns the value, and
"choose [receive a,receive b]" is the event that, when you  
synchronize to
it, waits for a value to be sent on either "a" or "b" and returns the  
value
- in this case a and b must have the same value type.

<http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Event.html>

** David Teller then said:

While this module is absolutely great, it suffers from OCaml's
limitation that multi-threaded code runs only one one processor, even if
several are available.

For concurrency, I would suggest taking a look at Acute, but that's
quite low-level, when compared to JoCaml. Basically, the communication
primitives are similar to a somewhat lower-level version of the Event
module. I don't know whether there is a native code compiler, though.

========================================================================
3) Generic access to float arrays
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31772>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Andries Hekstra asked and Gerd Stolpmann answered:

 > Attached please find the first program I wrote. It has about the same
 > speed as its C++ counterpart (slightly faster). I welcome comments  
w.r.t.
 > programming style, esp. when it affects the speed of the program.

As you are doing a lot of array manipulation, this tip may increase
performance significantly: because "float array" is stored with a
different layout than all other arrays, the compiler generates a dynamic
check for every access when the type of the array elements cannot be
statically determined. For example, your function

let swapElement i j a = let x = a.(i) in a.(i) <- a.(j); a.(j) <- x

is polymorphic in the element type. If you define instead

let swapFloatElement i j (a : float array) =
   let x = a.(i) in a.(i) <- a.(j); a.(j) <- x

better code is generated because the mentioned check can be omitted  
by the
compiler. This applies only if the function is not inlined; swapElement
could be small enough (but qsort, for instance, is definitely not).

Unfortunately, one cannot define swapNonFloatElement because there is no
way to constrain a type that it is not float. So the type system cannot
represent this duality float/non-float, and one must fall back to as  
many
definitions as element types are actually used.

** Gerd Stolpmann added and Xavier Leroy said:

 > I forgot one thing: This comment is only correct for 32 bit code.  
64 bit
 > code has a uniform array layout for all element types.

Yes, but a generic access to a float array still involves an extra
boxing operation.  So, your advice is sound for 64-bit plaforms as well.

I had a very quick look at the original poster's code: it seems
reasonable performance-wise.  There are a few extra hacks that could
be done to increase performance at some expense in code clarity, for
instance turning

             a.(i).(j) <- f i j a.(i).(j);
in
             (let b = a.(i) in b.(j) <- f i j b.(j));

but I wouldn't recommend doing this unless profiling exhibits a big
"hot spot" in this function.

========================================================================
Using folding to read the cwn in vim 6+
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is a quick trick to help you read this CWN if you are viewing it  
using
vim (version 6 or greater).

:set foldmethod=expr
:set foldexpr=getline(v:lnum)=~'^=\\{78}$'?'<1':1
zM
If you know of a better way, please let me know.

========================================================================
Old cwn
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========================================================================

Alan Schmitt, <http://sardes.inrialpes.fr/~aschmitt/>

-- 
Alan Schmitt <http://sardes.inrialpes.fr/~aschmitt/>

The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool  
happen.
.O.
..O
OOO




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