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Comment by z1mm32m4n | Hacker News Reader

I noticed recently that there's an open PR for Homebrew to add a formula for MLTon. There are still a few glitches to be ironed out, but I'm really hopeful that they can resolve them. I've been using SML/NJ locally for schoolwork, but it'd be really nice to have an easy-to-install, full-fledged SML compiler with top-notch performance installable with just

    brew install mlton

[1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/48694

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That would be nice! It would certainly help grow the language even if only for the learning experience. A good install story can only help.

Getting the MLton compiler to install on OS X was pretty straight forward but I've never been able to get Basis to load properly.

I also recently burned an afternoon trying to install MLKit on OS X. This one seemed promising for its good docs, smltojs, and good FFI so I was bummed I couldn't get it work.

SMLNJ installs pretty easily but holy cow do you have to murder your PATH.

Eventually I settled for MoscowML which is a VM rather than native code but it has provided me the best ML on OS X experience so far. I also enjoy having the REPL.

Yours truly,

ML compiler/VM collector

Alice ML works on Mac OS X as well, although there was a build issue with "Resource temporary unavailable" that I had to work around. Build instructions are in the README: https://github.com/aliceml/aliceml

I didn't realize you were involved with Alice ML. Are you the only contributor? The original project page seems to be down.

You've been there longer than I, but it's nice to see your involvement in /r/sml as well. Thank you!

I hadn't noticed the original page had gone down. It was up a few days ago so hopefully it's only a temporary thing.

I've used Alice ML on a couple of projects for a while and didn't want to see it die so I got permission from the original authors to host a mirror on github and keep the bitrot away. I forked from work that Gareth Smith did on bitbucket a few years back (with his permission) that fixed some issues and added features. I'm the only one working on it at the moment but hopefully others join in. It's survived this long!

It's great to see you keeping /r/sml active!

Since you collect... be sure to check out the open sourced Harlequin MLWorks: https://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mlworks/ and https://github.com/Ravenbrook/mlworks

There are some branches on the repo with more recent work to get it to compile on other platforms.

Doesn't build yet but it's great this didn't get lost like other code. It's a shame licensing and ip management keeps some of our works under lock. Imagine books and scientific papers being kept in vaults. It's another good reason to start projects in the open without giving up ownership to a company or some organization. The FSF or INRIA could pull an Oracle and branch off into a closed code base, but that of course won't happen. Just illustrating the dangers of giving copyright ownership to a single entity like FSF or Google for that matter. Sorry for the rant, but INRIA's CLA rubs me the wrong way because they license OCaml as LGPL with the option to relicense under a liberal license exclusively to Caml Consortium members it seems: https://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/46fiox/ocaml_compile... They are in the right to do so and have valid reasons but it's not a great idea for a project with not that many external contributors.

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