From riccardo@CS.Cornell.EDU Sun Oct 28 01:14:45 2001
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 01:09:01 -0400
From: Riccardo Pucella <riccardo@CS.Cornell.EDU>
To: Jeffrey M. Vinocur <jmv16@cornell.edu>
Subject: Re: So how do we make ML actually do stuff? (fwd) 


+----------------------------------------------------------------------
| I haven't a clue what to tell this kid.  Obviously people don't
| need Emacs, but can SML actually produce binaries?

Almost. 

Consider your favorite program. Assume it has a main function entry
point, which for the sake of argument we'll call 'main'. It is a
function of type   (string * string list) -> OS.Process.status. 
It is a function that will take as its first argument argv[0], and as
second argument the list [argv[1],...,argv[n]]. 

What you do is that you compile your program in SML/NJ. When you're
ready to create your "binary", you call:
 SMLofNJ.exportFn ("somename",main);

(of course, main could be in some structure, i.e. MyProgram.main, and
it need not be called main, i.e. MyProgram.doit).

This will spew out a heap image on disk, called somename.x86-unix for
linux, similarly for others OSes)

To "execute" this binary, you simply call:

   sml SMLload=somename

and it will execute your program, without every giving you a prompt.
To distribute, you only need the heap image (somename.<arch>-<os>) and
the runtime system  (bin/.run/run.x86-unix). You can also call using

  run.x86-unix @SMLload=somename

Hope that helps. - R

--
Riccardo Pucella  (riccardo@cs.cornell.edu)
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/riccardo