That’s the question I found myself asking earlier this month when I was writing a simple compiler for an OCaml dialect called MinCaml. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a look at the Intel IA32 instruction references, but there are two volumes of detailed descriptions of all the functions one of these CPU provides: about 600 in total!

Ugly field selection syntax

OK, the most trivial complaint first. If we have defined a record like this:

Inspired by Yariv’s Blog, where he talks about a framework for building web applications in Erlang, and my so far abortive attempts to get into Erlang, I decided to give it another go with Erlyweb. Erlyweb depends on YAWS (Yet Another Web Server), however, and this proved to be a bit of a pain to install since I’m being difficult and using Windows on my development machine. So, in order to help any other lost souls who try to duplicate this feat in the future, I’m recording the process (tested against YAWS 1.68):