Hey,
happy new year to you all!
On 16/12/2024 16:31, Nick Betteridge wrote:
Thanks for your detailed reply - very useful and a great overview of how
you and Robur handle the compilation chain.
Thanks for the correct ocamlnat link - I should have asked at the time!
I also naively overlooked the issue of the C compiler/linker being
available in a mirage unikernel.
I recently looked into the "embeddding the OCaml native toplevel into a
unikernel", and there are several issues with it:
- it requires an assembler (since OCaml only generates assembly files) -
not sure if there's a native OCaml implementation,
- it also requires a linker to convert the assembly into a shared library,
- and finally it loads the shared library using dlopen (etc.) - which is
not available in a MirageOS unikernel setting.
So, for the moment I gave up on that front - it requires a better expert
in the OCaml runtime system whether there could be an easier path for
evaluating OCaml expressions within a constrained environment -- maybe
shipping the bytecode toplevel in a MirageOS unikernel and having a path
to access the native values? But here I don't understand how the native
and bytecode runtime differ, and if there's any chance to have
interoperability on that level?
Maybe one day I'll find an OCaml compiler/runtime expert to look into
that deeper :) Maybe here on the mailing list ;)
Hannes
