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

A better build system for OCaml

blog.janestreet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 219 posts

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#21

Post by yawaramin »

rwmj wrote: post #10

I respectfully have to disagree. As Fedora packager for OCaml packages, dune's configuration is yet another one-off, with a weird Lisp syntax, hard to understand, difficult to patch. I'd far rather people stuck to using more familiar Linux build systems. As an upstream OCaml developer, the whole thing falls down the minute you need to integrate other programming languages into your build (or OCaml code into a code ba…

> more familiar Linux build systems

What's a 'familiar Linux build system'? make?

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#22

Post by yawaramin »

zokier wrote: post #19
wk_end wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without getting into any specifics of it - I'm sure there's people with much more experience with these tools who can comment - I'll point out that neither buck nor bzl existed when JS decided to start building their own tool in 2012. Bazel's first release was in 2015, Buck's was in 2013. JS does have a bit of a NIH culture, but I'm not sure if that was really at play here. There just...weren't very many good build t…

> I'll point out that neither buck nor bzl existed when JS decided to start building their own tool in 2012. Bazel's first release was in 2015, Buck's was in 2013. But Dune started (according to this blog post) in 2016 and JS started seriously improving and adopting it last year. So to me Jenga sounds like a reasonable step in 2012, but pouring significant effort into migrating from Jenga to Dune (and improving Dune)…

Jenga and dune are the same thing, it was just renamed.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#23

Post by yawaramin »

Dune's crash message:

> I must not segfault. Uncertainty is the mind-killer. Exceptions are the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will fully express my cases. Execution will pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will unwind the stack along its path. Where the cases are handled there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#24

Post by munificent »

rwmj wrote: post #10

I respectfully have to disagree. As Fedora packager for OCaml packages, dune's configuration is yet another one-off, with a weird Lisp syntax, hard to understand, difficult to patch. I'd far rather people stuck to using more familiar Linux build systems. As an upstream OCaml developer, the whole thing falls down the minute you need to integrate other programming languages into your build (or OCaml code into a code ba…

> more familiar Linux build systems

"Familiar" is not a property of any system. It's a relation between a system and a user.

Some Linux build systems maybe be more familiar to some users, but will be less familiar to others. When picking a build system, you can't just look at the system itself and declare it familiar or not.

It's not even enough to look at the total number of users familiar with some thing. Hindi is one of the most familiar languages in the world, but you're probably gonna have a bad time if you use it for the menu in a cafe in rural Texas.

You have to look at your actual cohort of users (and potential future users) and see what's familiar to them. This is one of the key reasons why usability is actually a deeply hard problem. So much of usability hinges on familiarity, but familiarity is a human-specific highly variable property.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#25

Post by munificent »

dgfitz wrote: post #13

The only thing worse than a complex codebase is a complex build system. I think CMake is an abomination. “Hey go learn this new language to compile this other language!”

The only thing worse than a complex build system is a simple build system that can't build what you need to build. :(

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#26

Post by blobbers »

yawaramin wrote: post #21
rwmj wrote: post #10

I respectfully have to disagree. As Fedora packager for OCaml packages, dune's configuration is yet another one-off, with a weird Lisp syntax, hard to understand, difficult to patch. I'd far rather people stuck to using more familiar Linux build systems. As an upstream OCaml developer, the whole thing falls down the minute you need to integrate other programming languages into your build (or OCaml code into a code ba…

> more familiar Linux build systems What's a 'familiar Linux build system'? make?

They likely mean 'generally used with other languages'. make is an example.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#27

Post by jlarocco »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #14
tombert wrote: post #4

I have to respect Jane Street for proving that HM-typed functional programming can be production-ready and extremely fast when given enough love. I still occasionally hear things about how the more academic-styled functional languages can't work in production, but Ocaml shows that it absolutely can work, even with high performance requirements.

> HM-typed functional programming Mercury also uses Haskell for their backend https://mercury.com/

Too bad they didn't use their namesake:

https://mercurylang.org/

Would honestly be a lot more interesting than Haskell.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#28

Post by zokier »

yawaramin wrote: post #22
zokier wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll point out that neither buck nor bzl existed when JS decided to start building their own tool in 2012. Bazel's first release was in 2015, Buck's was in 2013. But Dune started (according to this blog post) in 2016 and JS started seriously improving and adopting it last year. So to me Jenga sounds like a reasonable step in 2012, but pouring significant effort into migrating from Jenga to Dune (and improving Dune)…

Jenga and dune are the same thing, it was just renamed.

The blog post clearly describes them as two different systems, and how Jane Street migrated from one to another.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#29

Post by nicoburns »

rwmj wrote: post #10

I respectfully have to disagree. As Fedora packager for OCaml packages, dune's configuration is yet another one-off, with a weird Lisp syntax, hard to understand, difficult to patch. I'd far rather people stuck to using more familiar Linux build systems. As an upstream OCaml developer, the whole thing falls down the minute you need to integrate other programming languages into your build (or OCaml code into a code ba…

As a user of Linux, I wish Linux distributions would abandon their build systems which really only work well for C and maybe C++, and also only work on one platform (not even the whole of linux!) meaning that packaging has to be duplicated for every OS, and stuck to using more familiar language-specific build systems that work everywhere.

(this rant more or less equally applies to all os-or-distro-specific build systems)

---

This rant is only semi-serious. I do see some value in the Linux distribution style packaging. In particular, I do sympathise with the need to do cross-language builds. But goodness are they a pain to work with, and probably the biggest barrier to me shipping software on Linux.

My hope is that eventually an evolution on build systems like bazel/buck2 will lead to a truly universal build system that is both cross-platform and cross-language. But unfortunately it doesn't look like it's coming soon.

Re: A better build system for OCaml

#30

Post by dgfitz »

munificent wrote: post #25
dgfitz wrote: post #13

The only thing worse than a complex codebase is a complex build system. I think CMake is an abomination. “Hey go learn this new language to compile this other language!”

The only thing worse than a complex build system is a simple build system that can't build what you need to build. :(

This means the architecture is also bad, and that is what needs to be fixed.
Post reply on HN