When choosing a functional programming language for use with LLVM, what are the trade-offs?

functional-programming, haskell, llvm, ocaml

Solution

Either OCaml or Haskell would be a good choice. Why not check out the LLVM tutorials for each language? The LLVM tutorial for OCaml is here: http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/OCamlLangImpl1.html

Haskell has more momentum these days, but there are plenty of good parsing libraries for OCaml as well including the PEG parser generator Aurochs, Menhir, and the GLR parser generator Dypgen. Also check out this presentation on pcl a monadic parser combinator library for OCaml (like Parsec for Haskell) there's some good info in there comparing Haskell's and OCaml's approach: http://osp.janestreet.com/files/pcl.pdf

Some will say that laziness gives Haskell the edge in parsing, but you can get laziness in OCaml as well.

Problem

Let's assume for the moment that C++ is not a functional programming language. If you want to write a compiler using LLVM for the back-end, and you want to use a functional programming language and its bindings to LLVM to do your work, you have two choices as far as I know: Objective Caml and Haskell. If there are others, then I'd like to know about those too. I'm not asking for subjective opinions, so please don't give this the `subjective` tag. I want to make up my own mind about this, but I'm not sure I know what are all the trade-offs. So, StackOverflow to the rescue. What are the trade-offs?

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