[Gllug] trashman - a trash management utility for Linux filesystem

[Nix]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Richard Jones suggested tentatively:
> On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 09:32:11PM +0000, Nix wrote:
>> ... although quite why one would use ML and then write C in it
>> is... unclear to me. ;)
> 
> Well, coz you can use the high level stuff throughout your code, then
> profile it to find out where the "hot spots" are, which you then
> rewrite in a C/imperative style.  Also because it's got a very good
> garbage collector.

True :) but in any case speed is not important for most applications I'm
considering right now: or, rather, it is, but the way you speed them up
is by fixing the algorithms. (I expect most time in recantd to be
consumed waiting for the DB. Sort of. It's like most daemons in that
really most time will be `consumed' waiting for users send some request
;) )

>   By moving to ML, we have made it possible to use formal verification
>   tools to prove the correctness of critical Horus protocols and
>   algorithms.

(Irrelevant to any use I know of, all such tools cost a bomb and are
agonizingly difficult to use)

>               The ML version of the system is also amenable to
>   semi-automated protocol optimizations, which have slashed overhead and
>   latency for heavily used protocols: latency is as low as 75us on ATM,
>   and throughput as high as 80,000 multicasts per second.

Nifty indeed :)

> I think I read somewhere else that the code was 10 times shorter too.

And that tends to mean either ten times easier to read or ten times more
arcane (I'm thinking here of the approach to problems seemingly common
in the Haskell world, which is to take stuff which is easy but ugly in
other languages and rewrite it into something much shorter but which
requires several dozen pages of heavy maths to describe and is almost
totally incomprehensible without at least six degrees. Sort of like Perl
golf only even more ludicrous.)


OCaml is right at the top of my languages-to-learn list, anyway :)

(Note also that the FUSE libraries are not ported to OCaml yet, so
I hope it has good C FFI abilities...)

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