From : Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy AT inria.fr>

: Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy AT inria.fr> To : caml-list <caml-list AT inria.fr>

: caml-list <caml-list AT inria.fr> Subject : [Caml-list] 20th anniversary

: [Caml-list] 20th anniversary Date : Sat, 12 Sep 2015 10:04:11 +0200

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Twenty years ago to this day, on Sept 12th 1995, the mail below announcedthe availability of Caml Special Light 1.06. This was the first publicrelease of the programming language and system that was to become ObjectiveCaml, then OCaml.All the Caml Special Light language design is still there today in OCaml;likewise, parts of the implementation are clearly recognizable in the latestOCaml sources. However, in 20 years, the language picked up many languagefeatures that were open research problems in 1995, such as objects andclasses with type inference, polymorphic variants, first-class polymorphism,and first-class modules. Likewise, the implementation, initially targetedto Unix workstations, is now running on an amazing variety of platforms,from $35 Raspberry Pi to mainframes with 1 TB of RAM to cloud distributedsystems.The most spectacular evolution of those 20 years is certainly the growth ofthe user's community and programming ecosystem. Many application areas ofOCaml were not expected, such as financial applications and systemsprogramming; others, such as Web programming and bioinformatics, did noteven exist in 1995. Likewise, the amount of freely available libraries,programming tools, programming environments, teaching material, andinfrastructure (OPAM & the Platform) is well beyond my wildest dreams of thetime. A big "thank you" to the great many people who contributed to thissuccess!Far from slowing down, OCaml's development has been picking up momentumrecently. The next 20 years of OCaml will be exciting indeed!- Xavier Leroy, on behalf of the core Caml development teamFrom: Xavier Leroy Message-Id:<199509120927.LAA00417 AT pauillac.inria.fr>Subject: Release 1.06 of Caml Special LightTo:caml-list AT pauillac.inria.frDate: Tue, 12 Sep 1995 11:27:13 +0200 (MET DST)Announcing Caml Special Light 1.06, the first public release of theCaml Special Light system.Caml Special Light is a complete reimplementation of Caml Light thatadds a powerful module system in the style of Standard ML. The modulesystem is based on the notion of manifest types / translucent sums; itsupports Modula-style separate compilation, and fully transparenthigher-order functors (see the papers in the POPL 94 and 95proceedings).Caml Special Light comprises two compilers: a bytecode compiler in thestyle of Caml Light (but up to twice as fast), and a high-performancenative code compiler for the following platforms:Alpha processors: DecStation 3000 under OSF1Sparc processors: Sun Sparcstation under SunOS 4.1 or Solaris 2Intel 386 / 486 / Pentium processors: PCs under LinuxMips processors: DecStation 3100 and 5000 under Ultrix 4The native-code compiler delivers excellent performance (better thanStandard ML of New Jersey 1.08 on our tests), while retaining themoderate memory requirements of the bytecode compiler.Caml Special Light is still in the experimental state: the baselanguage has changed and will change again in significant ways,source-level compatibility is not ensured, the implementation isalpha-release quality, and many Caml Light tools and libraries havenot yet been ported to Caml Special Light. The present release istargeted towards testers, adventurous souls, and users with stronginterest in modules and high-performance compilation; other users areencouraged to stay with Caml Light 0.7 for a while.The source distribution (for Unix machines only) is available byanonymous FTP on ftp.inria.fr, directory lang/caml-light.More information on Caml Special Light is available on the World WideWeb, at http://pauillac.inria.fr/csl/ Bug reports and technical questions should be directed tocaml-light AT pauillac.inria.fr.For general questions and comments,use the Caml mailing listcaml-list AT pauillac.inria.fr(to subscribe:caml-list-request AT pauillac.inria.fr).- Xavier Leroy%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Caml Special Light "Taste Caml in a whole new Light" %caml-light AT pauillac.inria.fr% Projet Cristal, INRIA, B.P.105, 78153 Le Chesnay, France. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%