Fan’s history

Fan is a successor to Camlp4, which was mainly developed by Daniel de Rauglaudre and Michel Mauny, and later was largely renovated by Nicolas Pouillard.

In the fall semester of 2011, I had an indepedent study with Stephanie Weirich on Generic programming in Haskell, later I ported it into OCaml using Camlp4 in the spring semester of 2012.

Later, I found Camlp4 too slow and verbose, and it’s very hard to write a plugin for it, then I started Fan as a research project under the guidance of Steve Zdancewic, from July 2012.

Special thanks to John McCarthy and Xavier Leory for their contribution to proramming language design.