package malfunction
Install
Dune Dependency
Authors
Maintainers
Sources
md5=40244156e32c772a0060971f4e72e9a9
sha512=d94c96b414ad710c6174ee699a52389f108f4cc0278f52367e10aa7401be7c071113f6c40de1e2a4d939962c8f8f64f63ae99a88d85172540dcb593a07bb31bc
Description
Malfunction is a high-performance, low-level untyped program representation, designed as a target for compilers of functional programming languages.
Published: 29 May 2023
README
README.md
Malfunction is a high-performance, low-level untyped program representation, designed as a target for compilers of functional programming languages.
Malfunction is a revolting hack, exposing bits of the OCaml compiler's guts that were never meant to see the light of day.
"Hello, World" looks like this:
(module
(_ (apply (global $Stdlib $print_string) "Hello, world!\n"))
(export))
Malfunction requires OCaml (at least version 4.04.0, and you may see better performance with flambda enabled), which you should install using OPAM. Then, install malfunction using:
opam pin add malfunction git://github.com/stedolan/malfunction.git
You can then compile and run the above example with:
malfunction compile docs/helloworld.mlf -o hello
./hello
The syntax is based on s-expressions, and is designed to be easy to correctly generate, rather than to be particularly beautiful. For instance, there are no reserved words: all user-defined identifiers must be prefixed with $
.
Files are compiled as OCaml modules, and may import values from OCaml (e.g. Stdlib.print_string
in the example above) and export values to OCaml (using the export
form). Modules written in malfunction may be combined with an mli
file written in OCaml.
Malfunction makes no effort to check types. Typical programs do go wrong. Compilers targeting Malfunction need to convince themselves that their output won't go wrong, but don't need to explain their reasoning.
For more, read the spec, or the abstract submitted to the ML Workshop, or some examples
There's also an experimental backend for the dependently typed language Idris.