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<title>Drawbacks</title>
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MLton
20241230
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<h1>Drawbacks</h1>
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<p>MLton has several drawbacks due to its use of whole-program
compilation.</p>
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<p>Large compile-time memory requirement.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>Long compile times.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>No interactive top level.</p>
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<p>Because of whole-program compilation, MLton does not provide an
interactive top level.  In particular, it does not implement the
optional <a href="BasisLibrary">Basis Library</a> function <code>use</code>.</p>
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Last updated Thu Oct 21 15:53:06 2021 -0400 by Matthew Fluet.
<a href="https://github.com/MLton/mlton/commits/master/doc/guide/src/Drawbacks.adoc">Log</a>
<a href="https://github.com/MLton/mlton/edit/master/doc/guide/src/Drawbacks.adoc">Edit</a>
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