doc/guide/src/History.adoc

   1 History
   2 =======
   3
   4 In April 1997, Stephen Weeks wrote a defunctorizer for Standard ML and
   5 integrated it with SML/NJ.  The defunctorizer used SML/NJ's visible
   6 compiler and operated on the `Ast` intermediate representation
   7 produced by the SML/NJ front end.  Experiments showed that
   8 defunctorization gave a speedup of up to six times over separate
   9 compilation and up to two times over batch compilation without functor
  10 expansion.
  11
  12 In August 1997, we began development of an independent compiler for
  13 SML.  At the time the compiler was called `smlc`.  By October, we had
  14 a working monomorphiser.  By November, we added a polyvariant
  15 higher-order control-flow analysis.  At that point, MLton was about
  16 10,000 lines of code.
  17
  18 Over the next year and half, `smlc` morphed into a full-fledged
  19 compiler for SML.  It was renamed MLton, and first released in March
  20 1999.
  21
  22 From the start, MLton has been driven by whole-program optimization
  23 and an emphasis on performance.  Also from the start, MLton has had a
  24 fast C FFI and `IntInf` based on the GNU multiprecision library.  At
  25 its first release, MLton was 48,006 lines.
  26
  27 Between the March 1999 and January 2002, MLton grew to 102,541 lines,
  28 as we added a native code generator, mllex, mlyacc, a profiler, many
  29 optimizations, and many libraries including threads and signal
  30 handling.
  31
  32 During 2002, MLton grew to 112,204 lines and we had releases in April
  33 and September.  We added support for cross compilation and used this
  34 to enable MLton to run on Cygwin/Windows and FreeBSD.  We also made
  35 improvements to the garbage collector, so that it now works with large
  36 arrays and up to 4G of memory and so that it automatically uses
  37 copying, mark-compact, or generational collection depending on heap
  38 usage and RAM size.  We also continued improvements to the optimizer
  39 and libraries.
  40
  41 During 2003, MLton grew to 122,299 lines and we had releases in March
  42 and July.  We extended the profiler to support source-level profiling
  43 of time and allocation and to display call graphs.  We completed the
  44 Basis Library implementation, and added new MLton-specific libraries
  45 for weak pointers and finalization.  We extended the FFI to allow
  46 callbacks from C to SML.  We added support for the Sparc/Solaris
  47 platform, and made many improvements to the C code generator.