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

Tue May 27 00:40:06 PDT 2008

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of May 20 to 27, 2008.

1) [Job] Ingénieur associé at Inria Rennes
2) Introducing Frama-C
3) OCaml-Java project: 1.0 release

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1) [Job] Ingénieur associé at Inria Rennes
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/c7752929a3dc9d24# 
 >
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Frédéric Besson announced:

Interested in static program analysis? A passionate Caml developer ?

For several years, the Inria Lande project-team located in Rennes has  
been
developing static analyses targeting Java byte code. We are now  
looking for a
talented Caml Programmer who wants to be the cornerstone of this  
development
effort aimed at producing a tool that provides a number of cooperating
analyses, including control flow, relational numerical domains, alias  
and null
references.

The formal job announcement  (in French) can be found on the Inria   
website at
<http://www.inria.fr/travailler/mrted/en/eng/details.html?id=PNGFK026203F3VBQB6G68LOE1&LOV5=4510&LOV6=4514&LG=EN&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=2523&nPostingTargetID=5999&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=10 
 >

The succesful candidate will join the Lande project-team and interact  
with the
permanent academic staff as well as the PhD students working in the  
project.
* The position is for one year with the possibility of a one year  
extension
   based upon achievements
* The position is open to junior software engineers with a Master's  
degree (or
   equivalent)
* The gross salary is 2495? per month.

For more information, contact fbesson at irisa.fr

========================================================================
2) Introducing Frama-C
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/ec5e7743cc6d2c26# 
 >
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Virgile Prevosto announced:

The Frama-C development team is proud to announce the availability
of Frama-C, the framework for the development of collaborating
static analyzers for the C language. Many analyzers are provided in the
distribution, including a value analysis plug-in that provides variation
domains for the variables of the program, and Jessie, a plug-in
for computing Hoare style weakest preconditions.

Frama-C is Open Source software. It is written in Ocaml and relies
on the CIL (C Intermediate Language) library.

Additional information, source code and documentation for Frama-C
are available now at <http://frama-c.cea.fr/>. Binary distributions for
various popular environments will be forthcoming.

For the Frama-C development team,
-- 
Pascal Cuoq and Virgile Prevosto

========================================================================
3) OCaml-Java project: 1.0 release
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/4953c52cef7e5acd# 
 >
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Xavier Clerc announced:

This post announces the 1.0 release of the OCaml-Java project.
The goal of the OCaml-Java project is to allow seamless integration of  
OCaml
and Java.
Home page: <http://ocamljava.x9c.fr>

This version features a new source distribution which includes the  
standard
distribution of Objective Caml 3.10.2, and all the libraries needed to  
build
the whole OCaml-Java project.
URL: <http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/downloads.html>

Main changes since beta:
  - source distribution
  - support for OCaml 3.10.2
  - support for camlp4
  - better handling of Java errors
  - ocamllex, ocamldoc, and ocamldep added to the binary distribution
  - bug fixes

I am still looking for testers, particularly concerning the source
distribution. So far, this distribution has been tested on two  
platforms:
MacOS X.5 (32-bit), and Fedora 8 (64-bit). I will be thankful to  
developers
reporting success or failure on other platforms.

** Jon Harrop asked and Xavier Clerc answered:

 > I would love to test this but I do have some questions:
 > 1. Do threads run in parallel, i.e. does it leverage the concurrent  
GC in
 > the JVM?

No. This is in fact not possible as some parts of the OCaml runtime  
work only
under the assumption that there is only one thread in the runtime at  
once.
However, as soon as this assumption is lifted it will be possible to use
the concurrent GC of the JVM (the OCaml summer of code is supposed to  
deliver
such a patch to be integrated in the official Caml distribution if I  
remember
correctly).

 > 2. What is the performance like?

As of today, performance is not good. My objective for the 1.x branch  
is to
work on compatibility with the original implementation. Performance  
issues
are postponed to the 2.x branch. In the meantime, OCaml-Java has  
proved fast
enough to program lightweight GUI applications. Moreover, the very  
early (and
unconclusive) tests I run seem to show that it compete with so-called  
script
languages.

 > 3. Is anyone working on Debian packages for OCamlJava?

Well, Richard Jones provided a Fedora package for alpha/beta.
It should not be very hard to adapt to 1.0 final, or to Debian.

 > 4. Are tail calls fully implemented and, if not, when exactly do  
they work?

Tail calls are fully implemented for direct recursion, but not for  
calls to
other functions (it is not possible to "jump" out of a method in Java).

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Using folding to read the cwn in vim 6+
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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.

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

-- 
Alan Schmitt <http://alan.petitepomme.net/>

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

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