doc/guide/localhost/History

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  22 <a href="./Home">MLton 20180207</a>
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  26 <h1>History</h1>
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  31 <div class="paragraph"><p>In April 1997, Stephen Weeks wrote a defunctorizer for Standard ML and
  32 integrated it with SML/NJ.  The defunctorizer used SML/NJ&#8217;s visible
  33 compiler and operated on the <span class="monospaced">Ast</span> intermediate representation
  34 produced by the SML/NJ front end.  Experiments showed that
  35 defunctorization gave a speedup of up to six times over separate
  36 compilation and up to two times over batch compilation without functor
  37 expansion.</p></div>
  38 <div class="paragraph"><p>In August 1997, we began development of an independent compiler for
  39 SML.  At the time the compiler was called <span class="monospaced">smlc</span>.  By October, we had
  40 a working monomorphiser.  By November, we added a polyvariant
  41 higher-order control-flow analysis.  At that point, MLton was about
  42 10,000 lines of code.</p></div>
  43 <div class="paragraph"><p>Over the next year and half, <span class="monospaced">smlc</span> morphed into a full-fledged
  44 compiler for SML.  It was renamed MLton, and first released in March
  45 1999.</p></div>
  46 <div class="paragraph"><p>From the start, MLton has been driven by whole-program optimization
  47 and an emphasis on performance.  Also from the start, MLton has had a
  48 fast C FFI and <span class="monospaced">IntInf</span> based on the GNU multiprecision library.  At
  49 its first release, MLton was 48,006 lines.</p></div>
  50 <div class="paragraph"><p>Between the March 1999 and January 2002, MLton grew to 102,541 lines,
  51 as we added a native code generator, mllex, mlyacc, a profiler, many
  52 optimizations, and many libraries including threads and signal
  53 handling.</p></div>
  54 <div class="paragraph"><p>During 2002, MLton grew to 112,204 lines and we had releases in April
  55 and September.  We added support for cross compilation and used this
  56 to enable MLton to run on Cygwin/Windows and FreeBSD.  We also made
  57 improvements to the garbage collector, so that it now works with large
  58 arrays and up to 4G of memory and so that it automatically uses
  59 copying, mark-compact, or generational collection depending on heap
  60 usage and RAM size.  We also continued improvements to the optimizer
  61 and libraries.</p></div>
  62 <div class="paragraph"><p>During 2003, MLton grew to 122,299 lines and we had releases in March
  63 and July.  We extended the profiler to support source-level profiling
  64 of time and allocation and to display call graphs.  We completed the
  65 Basis Library implementation, and added new MLton-specific libraries
  66 for weak pointers and finalization.  We extended the FFI to allow
  67 callbacks from C to SML.  We added support for the Sparc/Solaris
  68 platform, and made many improvements to the C code generator.</p></div>
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