MLWorks Project

1. Introduction

This is the project document for the MLWorks Project. This document will be updated as the project develops to provide an index to all the project materials, and an overview of the project, its status, and so on. It's the starting point for anyone interested in the project, and a document to read to check on the project's progress.

The readership of this document is anyone interested in the project.

This document is not confidential.

2. Project Overview

MLWorks is an "industrial strength" Standard ML compiler and integrated development environment, developed by Harlequin in the 1990s. You can see the MLWorks product pages from 1999 at the Internet Archive [Harlequin 1998-09-28].

MLWorks is now an open source project, curated by Ravenbrook at GitHub in the Ravenbrook / mlworks repository.

3. Project Status

The source code does not currently build. MLWorks was able to bootstrap from C and SML/NJ and should still be able to. The run-time system is probably out of date. It's likely that the compiler will boot fairly easily. The status of the graphical IDE is unknown.

3.1. Previously

Ravenbrook Limited acquired the rights to MLWorks from Xanalys Limited on 2013-04-25, and a copy of the source code repository.

We have so far extracted only the "latest" revisions of the source tree and put them on GitHub in the Ravenbrook / mlworks repository.

3.2. Currently

• We are attempting to build MLWorks.
• We are attempting to retrieve the full history from Harlequin's RCS-based DVCS, "Hope", so that we can create a Git repository with a full history. This should help with getting the system going, maintaining it, and giving credit to all the programmers who worked on it.
• We are attempting to build a community around MLWorks on the mlworks-discussion mailing list. Many of the original Harlequin team are on the list.

3.3. Next

We'd like to make MLWorks useful.

4. Project Tree

The project sources are available at https://github.com/Ravenbrook/mlworks.

A. References

B. Document History

Copyright © 2013 Ravenbrook Limited. This document is provided "as is", without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this document. You may not duplicate or reproduce this document in any form without the express permission of the copyright holder.