[cwn] Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News
Alan Schmitt
alan.schmitt at polytechnique.org
Tue May 5 02:39:58 PDT 2009
Hello,
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of April 28 to May
05, 2009.
1) OCaml on iPhone
2) EPTCS launch
3) Other Caml News
========================================================================
1) OCaml on iPhone
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/0e411d2051ead4b4#
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Continuing a related thread, Nathaniel Gray asked and Jeff Scofield
said:
> Speaking of which, has anybody built an ocaml cross compiler for the
> iphone that can work with native cocoa touch apps built with the
> official SDK? It's probably too late for my current project but in
> the future I'd love to use ocaml for my iPhone projects. I tried
> following the instructions here[1] with some necessary
> modifications[2] to get the assembler to work but my test app crashed
> as soon as it entered ocaml code. I don't know enough about the ARM
> platform to say why.
Yes, we have OCaml 3.10.2 cross compiling for iPhone OS 2.2.
We started from the instructions you mention:
> [1] <http://web.yl.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~tosh/ocaml-on-iphone/>
We made the same change to the .global pseudo-ops:
> [2] I had to change all '.global' to '.globl' in arm.s and
> arm/emit.mlp. I have no idea what that signifies.
(These are just variant spellings of the same pseudo-op
for declaring a global symbol. For whatever reason, the
Apple assembler seems to insist on .globl. Other
incarnations of gas seem to allow either spelling.)
There are at least two more problems, however. Presumably
this is due to differences between the iPhone ABI and the one that
the ARM port (the old one I guess you could say) is targeted for.
1. arm.S uses r10 as a scratch register, but it is not a scratch
register on iPhone. It has to be saved/restored when passing
between OCaml and the native iPhone code (I think of it as
ObjC code). Note, by the way, that gdb shows r10 by the
alternate name of sl. This is confusing at first.
2. arm.S assumes r9 can be used as a general purpose register,
but it is used on the iPhone to hold a global thread context.
Again, it has to be saved/restored (or at least that's what we
decided to do).
We saw crashes caused by both of these problems.
I'm appending a new version of arm.S that works for us with
one OCaml thread. (Multiple threads will almost certainly
require more careful handling of r9.) It has the patches
from Toshiyuki Maeda mentioned above and a few of our
own to fix these two problems.
We have an application that has been working well for
a couple months, so there's some evidence that these
changes are sufficient.
We also made a small fix to the ARM code generator
(beyond the patches from Toshiyuki Maeda). In essence,
it fixes up the handling of unboxed floating return
values of external functions. Things mostly work without
this change; I'll save a description for a later post (if
anybody is interested).
(Editor note: see the archive link for the arm.S code.)
** Nathaniel Gray then asked and Jeff Scofield replied:
> Awesome, but now I'm confused because the arm.S you included
> has lots of .global pseudo-ops. Do you not compile it with
> Apple's as?
At around line 36, you'll see:
#define global globl
As I said in private mail, you could call this a hack, but it's a
way to avoid making lots of small changes everywhere in the file.
> What's your app?
We're working on a collection of card games for casual play.
> How are you managing the interface between Cocoa and OCaml?
This is a big topic. The summary is that we model Cocoa objects
as OCaml objects. We have a layer that wraps OCaml objects in
smallish ObjC objects for use on the ObjC side, and wraps ObjC
objects in smallish OCaml objects for use on the OCaml side. The
layer then translates between these representations as required
for calls into iPhoneOS and Cocoa Touch from OCaml (asking for
iPhone OS services) and into OCaml from iPhoneOS (for event
handling).
> > We also made a small fix to the ARM code generator
>
> I am very interested in any and all information needed to get a
> correct OCaml port suitable for use in App Store applications.
> Please share!
OK, I'll gather up our patch and send it to the list. I want to
separate out our changes from those of Toshiyuki Maeda [1].
As I said, our patch fixes calls to external C float functions
such as floor(), sin(), and so on. There is special handling in
ocamlopt to allow them to be unboxed, but the ABI of the existing
ARM code generator doesn't match the iPhone ABI.
Regards,
Jeff Scofield
Seattle
[1] <http://web.yl.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~tosh/ocaml-on-iphone/>
========================================================================
2) EPTCS launch
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/a309fd7489847c76#
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Rob van Glabbeek announced:
With this email, we are launching
Electronic Proceedings in Theoretic Computer Science (EPTCS)
a new international refereed open access venue for the rapid
electronic publication of the proceedings of workshops and
conferences, and of festschrifts, etc, in the general area of
theoretical computer science, broadly construed.
We do not charge authors or event organisers for electronic
publication in EPTCS in any way. If hard-copies of proceedings are
desired, event organisers have the choice of organising the printing
themselves or taking advantage of a standard contract we will make
with a printing house. Copyright on all papers is retained by the
author, and full-text electronic access to all papers is freely
available, without any need for registration or subscription.
Permanent archival of EPTCS publications is ensured by organising
EPTCS as an overlay of the Computing Research Repository (CoRR): see
arXiv.org. The content of EPTCS will be indexed by DBLP.
Only original papers will be considered for publication in EPTCS:
manuscripts are accepted for review by an EPTCS conference or workshop
with the understanding that the same work has not been published, nor
is presently submitted, elsewhere. However, full versions of extended
abstracts published in EPTCS, or substantial revisions, may later be
published elsewhere.
The submission and refereeing process is handled entirely by the
organisation of the conference, workshop or festschrift to which the
paper is submitted. Our editorial board carefully selects which
workshops and conferences can be trusted to select scientific papers
of quality only, and only those events will be granted a contract to
fill a volume of EPTCS.
Our editorial board consists of:
Luca Aceto Rob van Glabbeek Gordon Plotkin
Rajeev Alur Lane A. Hemaspaandra Vladimiro Sassone
Krzysztof R. Apt Matthew Hennessy Robert H. Sloan
Lars Arge Bartek Klin Wolfgang Thomas
Ran Canetti Evangelos Kranakis Irek Ulidowski
Luca Cardelli Shay Kutten Dorothea Wagner
Rocco De Nicola Nancy Lynch Martin Wirsing
Jose' Luiz Fiadeiro Aart Middeldorp Moti Yung
Wan Fokkink Benjamin Pierce
Further information can be found on our website:
<http://eptcs.org/>.
In the hope this initiative will benefit the theoretical computer
science community,
========================================================================
3) Other Caml News
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** From the ocamlcore planet blog:
Thanks to Alp Mestan, we now include in the Caml Weekly News the links
to the
recent posts from the ocamlcore planet blog at <http://planet.ocamlcore.org/
>.
ocaml-text:
<http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/ocaml-text/>
0.1.3 sources now in subversion:
<http://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=355>
Sudoku in ocamljs, part 2: RPC over HTTP:
<http://ambassadortothecomputers.blogspot.com/2009/05/sudoku-in-ocamljs-part-2-rpc-over-http.html
>
Bouncing Ball in OCaml with OCamlSDL:
<http://blog.mestan.fr/2009/04/28/bouncing-ball-in-ocaml-with-ocamlsdl/
>
Sudoku in ocamljs, part 1: DOM programming:
<http://ambassadortothecomputers.blogspot.com/2009/04/sudoku-in-ocamljs-part-1-dom.html
>
Using OCaml?s module functors to provide monadic contexts for Batteries:
<http://blog.mestan.fr/2009/04/24/using-ocamls-module-functors-to-provide-monadic-contexts-for-batteries/
>
Lastfm no longer free as in free beer (and some bits about xml in
OCaml):
<http://blog.rastageeks.org/spip.php?article34>
Last lecture:
<http://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/last-lecture/
>
Liquidsoap now supports AAC+ encoding.:
<http://blog.rastageeks.org/spip.php?article33>
========================================================================
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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========================================================================
--
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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