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Comment by sideeffffect | Hacker News Reader

SML comes with many implementations/compilers, but it is one standardized language (with formalized and verified semantics, IIRC).

Does that mean that there is one repository with modules (like PyPI or Maven Central) which all the implementations can use? Is there even a single build tool that can work with all (or at least some) of them (like Maven, etc.)?

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> it is one standardized language (with formalized and verified semantics, IIRC).

Unfortunately the spec defines too little, and there are large deviations between implementations. See

http://mlton.org/StandardMLPortability

http://mlton.org/UnresolvedBugs

http://mlton.org/SMLNJDeviations

SML/NJ is the most used implementation afaik. mlton is a whole-program optimizing compiler

I think there was something like a package manager.

Tbh, I wish we lived in an alternative reality where SML won over JS and we had it running on every major browser.

There's https://github.com/standardml/smackage

and https://github.com/diku-dk/smlpkg !

SML can run in every major browser: http://www.smlserver.org/smltojs/

Interestingly, SMLtoJs predates Elm and PureScript, but never really caught on.

Looks cool. Do you know if this ever escaped the lab and got used for anything interesting by people other than its creators?

A great achievement, but I think that's still running JS in the browser, not SML. Compiling to JS, to be able to run in the browser is not the same as the browsers natively supporting SML code.

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