= Projects

We have lots of ideas for projects to improve MLton, many of which we
do not have time to implement, or at least haven't started on yet.
Here is a list of some of those improvements, ranging from the easy (1
week) to the difficult (several months).  If you have any interest in
working on one of these, or some other improvement to MLton not listed
here, please send mail to
mailto:MLton-devel@mlton.org[`MLton-devel@mlton.org`].

* Port to new platform: Windows (native, not Cygwin or MinGW), ...
* Source-level debugger
* Heap profiler
* Interfaces to libraries: OpenGL, Gtk+, D-BUS, ...
* More libraries written in SML (see https://github.com/MLton/mltonlib[`mltonlib`])
* Additional constant types: `structure Real80: REAL`, ...
* An IDE (possibly integrated with <<Eclipse#>>)
* Port MLRISC and use for code generation
* Optimizations
** Improved closure representation
+
Right now, MLton's closure conversion algorithm uses a simple flat closure to represent each function.
+
*** http://www.mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2003-October/024570.html
*** http://www.mlton.org/pipermail/mlton-user/2007-July/001150.html
*** <<References#ShaoAppel94,ShaoAppel94>>
** Elimination of array bounds checks in loops
** Elimination of overflow checks on array index computations
** Common-subexpression elimination of repeated array subscripts
** Loop-invariant code motion, especially for tuple selects
** Partial redundancy elimination
*** http://www.mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2006-April/028598.html
** Loop unrolling, especially for small loops
** Auto-vectorization, for MMX/SSE/3DNow!/AltiVec (see the http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/tree-ssa/vectorization.html[work done on GCC])
** Optimize `MLton_eq`: pointer equality is necessarily false when one of the arguments is freshly allocated in the block
* Analyses
** Uncaught exception analysis
