Poly/ML
Poly/ML is a Standard ML implementation originally written in an experimental
language called Poly. It has been
fully compatible with the ML97 standard
since version 4.0. For a full history, see here.
Poly/ML takes a conservative approach to the Standard ML language and avoids
incompatible extensions. It has added various library extensions particularly
the thread library. Poly/ML's active development and unique
features make it an exceptional implementation.
Table of Contents
Features
- Fast compiler
- Preferred implementation for large projects such as Isabelle
and HOL. - Foreign function interface - allows
static and dynamic libraries to be loaded in Poly/ML and
exposes their functions as Poly/ML functions. See here
for an example of static linking. - Symbolic debugger
- Windows programming interface
- Thread library - provides a
simplified version of Posix threads modified for Standard ML and
allows Poly/ML programs to make use of multiple cores. The garbage collector is also
parallelised.
Basis
The documentation for the Poly/ML Basis library can be found here
and includes information on global values and types as well as structures,
signatures and functors. More in-depth documentation can be found at
the SML Family website here.
Platforms and Installation
Poly/ML has native support for i386 (32- and 64-bit) and bytecode support for unsupported
architectures. For more information, see the download
page.
Debian/Ubuntu
$ apt-get install polyml
OS X
$ brew install polyml
FreeBSD
$ cd /usr/ports/lang/polyml && make install
Git
To build:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make compiler
$ make install
To clean:
$ make clean-local clean distclean
Support
Support for Poly/ML can be found on Stackoverflow using the polyml
and sml tags or on the Poly/ML
mailing list provided by the University of Edinburgh.