Poly/ML

Since the 4.0 version of Poly/ML, it now supports the full version of the language as given in the "Definition of Standard ML (Revised)", generally known as ML97.

As well as being extremely fast and efficient implementation of Standard ML Poly/ML provides several additional features.

Poly/ML is available for the most popular architectures and operating systems.   There are native code versions for the i386 (32 and 64 bit), Power PC and Sparc architectures.   There is a byte-code interpreted version which can be used on unsupported architectures. The configure script will automatically select the architecture when building from source.

Features:

• There is a foreign language interface which allows dynamically linked libraries to be loaded and functions within them called from ML.
• An X-Windows interface using Motif is available and a Windows programming interface.
• There is also a symbolic debugger for Poly/ML.

What is new in this release:

• New Features:
• Support for stand-alone binaries
• Support for additional platforms: AMD64, Intel Macs, Cygwin
• No artificial limits on size of heaps or saved image
• Uses standard GNU tools for building
• Fixed address mmap and trap-handling removed

What is new in version 5.3:

• Major New Features:
• Addition of IDE interface support.
• Changes to pretty-printing and equality. These are now inherited across module boundaries. Addition of PolyML.addPrettyPrinter to install a new-style pretty printer.
• Reworked implementation of signatures reducing the memory requirements when a named signature is used in multiple places.
• Improvements to printing of types and error messages.
• Minor Additions and Changes:
• Support for out-of-tree builds
• Added finalisation for foreign-function interface (CInterface)
• Removed remaining support for ML90
• Added PolyML.sourceLocation pseudo-function that returns the current source location, PolyML.raiseWithLocation that raises an exception with an explicit location and PolyML.exceptionLocation that returns the location where an exception was raised.
• Added PolyML.Compiler.reportUnreferencedIds switch to enable reporting of unreferenced identifiers.
• Added breakEx and clearEx to debugger functions. These enter the debugger when the code raises a given exception.
• Improvement to resonsiveness to pipes especially in Windows.
• Added X86-64 version of Word32 structure. 64-bit machines do not require 32-bit values to be "boxed".
• Bug Fixes:
• Now builds on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
• Fix multi-threading on Sparc but now only supports v9 processors.
• Fix timing-related crash when Poly/ML exits
• Fix string argument to OS.SysErr exception
• Fix to OS.FileSys.mkDir in Windows
• Fix to pow(~1, n) where n is even
• Various fixes to conform more closely to the standard.