MLton 20210117

# Projects

We have lots of ideas for projects to improve MLton, many of which we do not have time to implement, or at least haven’t started on yet. Here is a list of some of those improvements, ranging from the easy (1 week) to the difficult (several months). If you have any interest in working on one of these, or some other improvement to MLton not listed here, please send mail to MLton-devel@mlton.org.

- Port to new platform: Windows (native, not Cygwin or MinGW), …

- Source-level debugger

- Heap profiler

- Interfaces to libraries: OpenGL, Gtk+, D-BUS, …

- More libraries written in SML (see mltonlib)

- Additional constant types: structure Real80: REAL, …

- An IDE (possibly integrated with Eclipse)

- Port MLRISC and use for code generation

- Optimizations

  - Improved closure representation

    Right now, MLton’s closure conversion algorithm uses a simple flat closure to represent each function.

    - http://www.mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2003-October/024570.html

    - http://www.mlton.org/pipermail/mlton-user/2007-July/001150.html

    - ShaoAppel94

  - Elimination of array bounds checks in loops

  - Elimination of overflow checks on array index computations

  - Common-subexpression elimination of repeated array subscripts

  - Loop-invariant code motion, especially for tuple selects

  - Partial redundancy elimination

    - http://www.mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2006-April/028598.html

  - Loop unrolling, especially for small loops

  - Auto-vectorization, for MMX/SSE/3DNow!/AltiVec (see the work done on GCC)

  - Optimize MLton_eq: pointer equality is necessarily false when one of the arguments is freshly allocated in the block

- Analyses

  - Uncaught exception analysis