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<a href="./Home">MLton 20130715</a>
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<h1>Drawbacks</h1>
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<div class="paragraph"><p>MLton has several drawbacks due to its use of whole-program
compilation.</p></div>
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<p>
Large compile-time memory requirement.
</p>
<div class="paragraph"><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></div>
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Long compile times.
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<div class="paragraph"><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></div>
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<p>
No interactive top level.
</p>
<div class="paragraph"><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 <span class="monospaced">use</span>.</p></div>
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