MLWorks is a compiler and interactive development environment for the Standard ML language, developed by Harlequin in the 1990s and now owned by Ravenbrook Limited.

The main project page is at <http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mlworks/>.

MLWorks has recently been rebooted¹ and we now have a command-line compiler that can compile itself on Windows. See the roadmap for our plans to get it running on other platforms, and work beyond that. Get involved!

Want to run the command-line compiler? On Windows, grab <http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mlworks/release/reboot/MLWorks-reboot.zip>. Unpack that then:

cd MLWorks-reboot
bin\I386\NT\main -MLWpass foo -load images\I386\NT\batch.img -MLWpass foo

and you should get a batch compiler.

Append arguments to the batch compiler to the second command. For example:

bin\I386\NT\main -MLWpass foo -load images\I386\NT\batch.img -MLWpass foo -help

This is the barest of bare releases, but it's enough to compile a compiler.

IMPORTANT: This repository currently starts at the latest revision of the MLWorks sources, and does not include the full version history. The master branch at some point be rebased to include the full history. Please work in branches to keep the number of master commits low and minimise disruption when this occurs. For details, see <https://github.com/Ravenbrook/mlworks/wiki/History-recovery>.

Please join the MLWorks discussion mailing list <http://mailman.ravenbrook.com/mailman/listinfo/mlworks-discussion>.

MLWorks is a commercially developed "industrial strength" ML development system, developed by Harlequin in the 1990s. Harlequin broke up in 1998, and MLWorks became property of Xanalys Limited. Ravenbrook Limited (whose directors were members of the original MLWorks team) acquired the rights to MLWorks on 2013-04-26 and open sourced the project.

Ravenbrook would like to thank Xanalys, and especially Paul Miller, for being both willing and generous to help with the open source publishing of this work.