download | history | home | papers | performance | projects | team | user guide | users

MLton started in July 1997 as a defunctorizer for Standard ML. From there, MLton morphed into a full-fledged compiler for SML and was first released in March 1999. From the start, MLton has been driven by whole-program optimization and an emphasis on performance. Also from the start, MLton has had a fast C FFI and IntInf based on the GNU multiprecision library. At its first release, MLton was 48,006 lines.

Between the March 1999 and January 2002, MLton grew to 102,541 lines, as we added a native code generator, mllex, mlyacc, a profiler, many optimizations, and many libraries including threads and signal handling. During 2002, we had releases in April and September and MLton grew to 112,204 lines, as we added support for cross compilation and used this to enable MLton to run on Cygwin/Windows and FreeBSD. We also made improvements to the garbage collector, so that it now works with large arrays and up to 4G of memory and so that it automatically uses copying, mark-compact, or generational collection depending on heap usage and RAM size. We also continued improvements to the optimizer and libraries.


MLton
Last modified: Mon Jul 7 16:20:51 PDT 2003