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Drawbacks

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MLton has several drawbacks due to its use of whole-program compilation.

- Large compile-time memory requirement.

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.

- Long compile times.

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.

- No interactive top level.

Because of whole-program compilation, MLton does not provide an interactive top level. In particular, it does not implement the optional Basis Library function `use`.

Last edited on 2005-12-02 04:19:39 by StephenWeeks.