[larsberg]

I agree completely with your library statements.

> I think one of the biggest mistakes in the life cycle of SML was premature specification.

I disagree. There were some earlier Successor ML efforts ~10 years ago (see: http://successor-ml.org/index.php?title=Main_Page ), but as I understand it, there was agreement on many of the small issues but larger challenges reaching consensus on bigger changes. You can see some notes from Bob Harper at the ML Workshop in 2013 on how we're moving forward currently:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/talks/mlw13.pdf

[bjz_]

That's certainly a pretty exciting presentation! Looks like a huge effort though... how much progress has there been since?

[larsberg]

We did the first part and very recently put http://www.sml-family.org/ online and announced the opening of the definition (whew!).

I'm primarily concerned with the parallelism and concurrency-related features, which we're trying to first clean up a bit more in the context of Manticore before trying to do something like proposing standardization for those features.

Also (IMO) you should take those slides more as a research direction for years of research investigating alternatives that eventually get standardized, not a 2015 implementation plan :-) Each of those topics casually mentions non-trivial extensions to problems that already have each had researcher-decades of investigation.