[MLton-user] 2006 ICFP Programming Contest

[Matthew Fluet]

> In a left handed way MLton was used in the ICFP 2004 contest.  I'd tried
> using PLT scheme in previous years and opted for SML that year.  I wrote
> the "Ant Simulator" the first evening using MLton.  And switched to
> Scheme the next day for the Ant Brain Compiler.
>
> The interesting observation was that there were a couple of fairly solid
> Scheme teams that year.  One (or both?) teams were 2 days into the
> contest and were still debugging their simulator.
>
> I'd had mine going the first evening in a few hours and it "just
> worked".  So a couple of teams borrowed the MLton simulator while
> debugging their respective implementations.
>
> Later, even after they'd finally got it working correctly, I sorta
> recall that they continued using the MLton version because it was
> ridiculously fast.  Running full Ant War simulations in 10's of secs
> when their simulators required 10s of minutes.

Very nice anecdote.  BTW, do you happen to have the SML simulator around? 
It might be a nice addition to the MLton benchmark suite.