<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
<title>Drawbacks - MLton Standard ML Compiler (SML Compiler)</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" charset="iso-8859-1" media="all" href="common.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" charset="iso-8859-1" media="screen" href="screen.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" charset="iso-8859-1" media="print" href="print.css">
<link rel="Start" href="Home">
</head>
<body lang="en" dir="ltr">
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-833377-1";
urchinTracker();
</script>
<table bgcolor = lightblue cellspacing = 0 style = "border: 0px;" width = 100%>
<tr>
<td style = "
border: 0px;
color: darkblue;
font-size: 150%;
text-align: left;">
<a class = mltona href="Home">MLton MLTONWIKIVERSION</a>
<td style = "
border: 0px;
font-size: 150%;
text-align: center;
width: 50%;">
Drawbacks
<td style = "
border: 0px;
text-align: right;">
<table cellspacing = 0 style = "border: 0px">
<tr style = "vertical-align: middle;">
</table>
<tr style = "background-color: white;">
<td colspan = 3
style = "
border: 0px;
font-size:70%;
text-align: right;">
<a href = "Home">Home</a>
<a href = "TitleIndex">Index</a>
</table>
<div id="content" lang="en" dir="ltr">
MLton has several drawbacks due to its use of whole-program compilation.
<ul>
<li>
<p>
Large compile-time memory requirement.
</p>
</li>
<ul>
Because MLton performs whole-program analysis and optimization, compilation requires a large amount of memory. For example, compiling MLton (over 140K lines) requires at least 512M RAM.
</ul>
<li class="gap">
<p>
Long compile times.
</p>
</li>
<ul>
Whole-program compilation can take a long time. For example, compiling MLton (over 140K lines) on a 1.6GHz machine takes five to ten minutes.
</ul>
<li class="gap">
<p>
No interactive top level.
</p>
</li>
<ul>
Because of whole-program compilation, MLton does not provide an interactive top level. In particular, it does not implement the optional <a href="BasisLibrary">Basis Library</a> function <tt>use</tt>. </ul>
</ul>
</div>
<p>
<hr>
Last edited on 2005-12-02 04:19:39 by <span title="ppp-71-139-183-221.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net"><a href="StephenWeeks">StephenWeeks</a></span>.
</body></html>
