make ocaml a typed javascript about commonml HOT 2 OPEN

That sounds great! There seems to be area for improvement right now in how CommonML uses js_of_ocaml and debugability/sourcemape. If you can create a backend that produces readable/debuggable JS, that's truly awesome and I'd be really excited about it.

There doesn't appear to be any way to file issues on your branch. (I noticed one critical "optimization" is not yet performed that should probably be prioritized). Can you state how you'd like people to file issues?

Can you explain your general approach for generating JS? If someone were to make a new js backend, it would be really great if someone were able to benefit from the new f-lambda optimizations that are coming. In order for OCaml to be considered a first class player on the web, performance should be a top priority, as well as debugability (I know those can sometimes be at odds with each other but having flags control which side of the spectrum you fall would be ideal). I would guess that it's possible to create JS compilation targets that run much faster than equivalent hand-written JS. There are a couple of issues right now making that more difficult with js_of_ocaml: The record fields are turned into numeric indices because it uses the ocamlc output which has erased the label names by that point. In some JS engines this is good for perf and in others it may be bad. Either way, it makes debugging more difficult.

from commonml.

I see a couple of interesting things in your fork:

• what looks like a debugger compiled from ml into JS? Does this allow using ocamldebug's time traveling debugger inside of JS?
• Requires as a way to model modules. Looks like a cool idea to integrate into CommonML - the JS output could automatically create granular modules that can be shared and you could perhaps only generate the small number of modules that actually changed - instead of having to reanalyze all of the JS every build (which takes time).

I'd definitely like to hear more about your general approach and goals.

from commonml.