CM: A Compilation Manager for SML/NJ. User Manual

CM is the compilation manager for Standard ML of New Jersey [MTH90, AM91]. It is loosely based on its precursor SC [HLPR94b, HLPR94a] and provides functionality similar to the well-known UNIX-program make [Fel79]. CM simplifies the maintenance of large software systems by subdividing them into a hierarchy of groups and libraries. Groups and libraries—collectively called entities—consist of individual SML source files, other groups, and other li-braries. Unlike make, which is meant to be a general-purpose tool not aimed at a specific language, CM provides automatic dependency analysis and a form of separate compilation known as cutoff recompilation [ATW94]. The compilation manager uses the hooks provided by SML/NJ’s open compiler [AM94] and translates SML sources to produce binary object files called binfiles. The SML sources themselves can be the result of executing other programs, which is accounted for by CM’s tools mechanism. Examples of such tools are the version control system RCS [Tic85], the parser-generator ML-Yacc [TA90], and the literate programming tool noweb [Ram94]. One important use for CM is the maintenance of SML/NJ’s compiler, which is not quite the same as maintaining other SML programs [App94]. For that reason we offer a special interface, which facilitates controlling batch compilation, bootstrapping, and the process of retargeting the compiler to a different machine architecture. 2 Why CM