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Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

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Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#21

Post by tbrownaw »

bsaul wrote: post #2

OCaml is pretty big in french universities, but could anyone from other countries say how popular this language is in their country (education and corporate sectors) ? I'm quite surprised to see a news about this language on the front page of HN.

University of Illinois uses it for CS421 "programming languages and compilers" (or at least they used to, and I'm assuming it won't have changed).

We don't use it at work, and I haven't heard any mention of it (or any other functional languages) at the various local programmer groups I recently started going to.

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#22

Post by gtani »

jon_smark wrote: post #19
jahewson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F# is a superset of OCaml and both are descendants of ML (ML was created here in Edinburgh). Having worked with Ocaml extensively I would say that the ecosystem around the language is pretty stale: the standard library sucks, as does the documentation for it and important libraries such as "batteries included" are under the GPL, which rules out many uses. Usability is poor: stack traces can be a nightmare to get work…

You should take a new/better look at OCaml, as most of the information you mentioned is wrong and/or out-of-date. For instance: * F# is not a superset of OCaml. OCaml has a number of powerful features missing from F#, like functors, polymorphic variants, and first-class modules. * I disagree that the ecosystem is "stale". There's lots of recent activity around the language, and you can find libraries for almost every…

also, there's Real World Ocaml beta, publically available. In this case, beta means manuscript has been commented on by many qualified reviewers already,

http://anil.recoil.org/2013/06/17/real-world-ocaml-beta-avai...

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#23

Post by bfung »

bsaul wrote: post #2

OCaml is pretty big in french universities, but could anyone from other countries say how popular this language is in their country (education and corporate sectors) ? I'm quite surprised to see a news about this language on the front page of HN.

University of Illinois teaches it in the Programming Languages course: http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/mps/index.html

Back in when it was CS 321, the course used bison and ocaml to build a smaller ML language, which helped in understanding ocaml itself!

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#24

Post by gregwebs »

I am using the google drive app for Windows (in a shared folder that my Linux VM sees). When I save a file with Vim it creates a duplicate copy on the GDrive server.

I couldn't figure out how to turn off Vim's file saving behaviour, so I will give this a shot and see if it works better.

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#25

Post by mhd »

bsaul wrote: post #2

OCaml is pretty big in french universities, but could anyone from other countries say how popular this language is in their country (education and corporate sectors) ? I'm quite surprised to see a news about this language on the front page of HN.

It is a compiled language with some decent enough unix integration, so this isn't the first system-level program I've seen written in it. The rather popular unison file synchronizer is Ocaml, too, if I'm not mistaken. For a while the most popular Linux client for the edonkey peer-to-peer file sharing network was mldonkey. And just recently I stumbled across a minimal PDF viewer called llpp that turned out to be Ocaml, too.

You can easily distribute packages without huge dependencies, it's not any worse at concurrency than your usual Unix go-to language C, and the FFI ain't half bad, either. It's also relatively unopinionated about IO, which certainly helps writing servers and system utilities.

There's also parsers and some web stuff, but I'll let others talk about this. Just wanted to say a bit about this somewhat surprising niche where the language managed to eke out a bit of a marketing share.

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#26

Post by bcuccioli »

bsaul wrote: post #2

OCaml is pretty big in french universities, but could anyone from other countries say how popular this language is in their country (education and corporate sectors) ? I'm quite surprised to see a news about this language on the front page of HN.

It's used in Cornell's intermediate-level, required, notoriously difficult functional programming course.

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#27

Post by georgemcbay »

bsaul wrote: post #2

OCaml is pretty big in french universities, but could anyone from other countries say how popular this language is in their country (education and corporate sectors) ? I'm quite surprised to see a news about this language on the front page of HN.

It isn't widely used here in the USA, in my experience and outside of people who are big fans of ML and derivatives, or those who had some OCaml exposure in college courses, most programmers here seem to be largely unaware of it.

I'm aware of it primarily through my exposure to Nicolas Cannasse's Haxe language, the compiler for which is written in OCaml.

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#28

Post by apaprocki »

bsaul wrote: post #2

OCaml is pretty big in french universities, but could anyone from other countries say how popular this language is in their country (education and corporate sectors) ? I'm quite surprised to see a news about this language on the front page of HN.

On my team at Bloomberg, we built a non-trivial (roughly 20k loc) DSL -> C++ "transpiler" in OCaml that is in the critical path responsible for building core parts of the infrastructure.

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#29

Post by agumonkey »

bcuccioli wrote: post #26
bsaul wrote: post #2

OCaml is pretty big in french universities, but could anyone from other countries say how popular this language is in their country (education and corporate sectors) ? I'm quite surprised to see a news about this language on the front page of HN.

It's used in Cornell's intermediate-level, required, notoriously difficult functional programming course.

It looks larger than the one I had in France. Happy to have read your comment.

offtopic ps: for a minute the staff pictures were CV segmented which was quite original.

Re: Show HN: FUSE filesystem for Google Drive written in OCaml

#30

Post by gregwebs »

gregwebs wrote: post #24

I am using the google drive app for Windows (in a shared folder that my Linux VM sees). When I save a file with Vim it creates a duplicate copy on the GDrive server. I couldn't figure out how to turn off Vim's file saving behaviour, so I will give this a shot and see if it works better.

works fine with Vim
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