Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Real World Ocaml announced

realworldocaml.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 58 posts

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#41

Post by sanxiyn »

gnuvince wrote: post #36
oconnor0 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what's impractical about Ocaml? The biggest issue Ocaml has is that its GC is single-threaded which basically removes the ability to do parallel programming inside a single executable. You have to resort to message passing between multiple processes. For what it's worth, I think I heard rumors there's work on an improved GC.

I'd add that Unicode support is also a problem. latin-1 isn't even good for French. My brother's name is Jérôme and the first thing I try with any language to check strings is this: # print_endline (String.uppercase "Jérôme");; JéRôME Oops, two characters didn't get properly uppercased. I really like OCaml, it's probably my favorite language, and I hope that RWO will increase its popularity and that this will in turn…

Try Camomile? http://camomile.sourceforge.net/

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#42

Post by rwmj »

antics wrote: post #10

Discussions of whether OCaml is "practical" or useful or good aside, this book really, really needed to be written. It may be the case that there are truly excellent resources for learning OCaml, but I know the language, and I've never heard of them. There's Jason Hickey's tutorial, an introduction or two scattered around the internet, and some book that was fan-translated from French, sure, but OCaml lacks the hacke…

In meagre defence of the catastrophe that was Practical OCaml, I'll point out this:

http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/

I'm reviewing drafts of Real World OCaml too, but after the sheer amount of work (and what went wrong) with P.O., I'm just going to informally comment on them.

OCaml as a language is extremely useful and practical. A good book on it really needs to be written.

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#43

Post by rwmj »

amirmc wrote: post #3

I'm curious. How many folks here have used OCaml for production work? I'd just like to get an idea of the numbers. Edit: By 'production work' I meant built things that are being used by other people.

I worked at a company that based a lot of stuff on OCaml, and since I'm working at Red Hat we use OCaml for a few things. In no particular order ...

* generating code, bindings etc in libguestfs (http://libguestfs.org/)

* analysing Windows Registries for hivex, using ocaml-bitstring

* virt-top

* virt-dmesg

* whenjobs

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#44

Post by crntaylor »

ths wrote: post #7
amirmc wrote: post #3

I'm curious. How many folks here have used OCaml for production work? I'd just like to get an idea of the numbers. Edit: By 'production work' I meant built things that are being used by other people.

You might find this interesting: https://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61 TL;DR: Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm whose language of choice is OCaml and has several people programming in it full-time. Besides experiencing the commonly-cited advantages of FP (productivity, expressiveness, local reasoning), they also found it highly performant, useful for rapid prototyping and resilient to changing requirements…

By "several people programming in it full-time" you mean "everyone who writes code in the company (IT, developers, researchers and traders) writes code in OCaml" right?. Yaron has said (perhaps in that video, perhaps somewhere else) that the founding partners (who were voice traders, not programmers) learned OCaml as their second programming language, after VBA. The language pervades the company.

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#45

Post by crntaylor »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #20

Perhaps OT: I've tried to like OCaml 2 or 3 times so far and have not succeeded. I've loved Haskell (until I hit the wall), enjoy Python, enjoyed Ruby, am very happy with JS, had a love/hate relationship with C/C++ (really, header files?!), loved Java compared to C/C++ (until I learned to hate Java). And I'm generally really excited by what's going on in languages right now. I just wish there was an SML for the JVM.…

My only experience with OCaml is two hours that I spent coding in it for an interview problem. So, from a complete beginner's perspective:

i) It needs better libraries, or perhaps better library documentation. A full hour of my time was spent working out how to read lines from a file.

ii) It is a beautiful language. The code I wrote, as someone completely new to the language and not using any libraries, was much shorter than the equivalent code I would have written in Python, a language which I know much better, and an order of magnitude shorter than what I would have written in Java or C. It makes functional abstraction easy in the same way that Haskell does, but the ability to mix in imperative code if it gets the job done in fewer lines (or in a less mind-bending way) is supremely useful.

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#46

Post by jamii »

amirmc wrote: post #3

I'm curious. How many folks here have used OCaml for production work? I'd just like to get an idea of the numbers. Edit: By 'production work' I meant built things that are being used by other people.

The search index that backs latexsearch.com is written in ocaml.

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#48

Post by Yoric »

crntaylor wrote: post #45
CoffeeDregs wrote: post #20

Perhaps OT: I've tried to like OCaml 2 or 3 times so far and have not succeeded. I've loved Haskell (until I hit the wall), enjoy Python, enjoyed Ruby, am very happy with JS, had a love/hate relationship with C/C++ (really, header files?!), loved Java compared to C/C++ (until I learned to hate Java). And I'm generally really excited by what's going on in languages right now. I just wish there was an SML for the JVM.…

My only experience with OCaml is two hours that I spent coding in it for an interview problem. So, from a complete beginner's perspective: i) It needs better libraries, or perhaps better library documentation. A full hour of my time was spent working out how to read lines from a file. ii) It is a beautiful language. The code I wrote, as someone completely new to the language and not using any libraries, was much shor…

For i), it's in progress: see OCaml Batteries Included http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#49

Post by Yoric »

amirmc wrote: post #3

I'm curious. How many folks here have used OCaml for production work? I'd just like to get an idea of the numbers. Edit: By 'production work' I meant built things that are being used by other people.

I used to. We even have an AppStore application written in OCaml.

Re: Real World Ocaml announced

#50

Post by gaius »

jlarocco wrote: post #31
chubot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's impractical about Ocaml? I just looked at it and it looks cool, but I haven't tried it for anything. If they actually have event driven programming that seems like a big step over most functional languages, where I/O is kind of an afterthought. Steve Yegge wrote some points about Ocaml quite awhile ago. http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ocaml He says it is quite fast and I've seen that in other place…

I've tried OCaml a few times over the years, and I think its biggest problems are chicken/egg problems. It's impractical for "real world" use because not many people are using it in the real world. My biggest complaints: * Poor libraries - This is getting better, but it used to be a real pain to do stuff like make an HTTP request, parse JSON or XML, or connect to a database. They definitely weren't in the stdlib, and…

connect to a database

This is something I have been working on http://gaiustech.github.com/ociml/

Post reply on HN