Is any of this OCaml specific? You can check all boxes with TypeScript.
Does TypeScript emit machine code? OCaml gives you this option, if you need it.
But they say "we use ocaml [because it has types]" not "[because it can emit machine code]"
We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
11–20 of 127 posts
Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#12Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#13I like OCaml and have written the "why we chose XYZ language" posts. Most of the time the real answer is "we like it and it makes us feel good to use it". Like the answers aren't wrong per se but they're more post-facto justifications. And that's perfectly fine! I think we should normalize saying that tech stack choices are subjective and preference-based. We're not robots. The social and aesthetic parts of a stack m…
The first comments here are people reading this as if the authors are saying only OCaml can do this. They aren't.
Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#14I don't really get what's special about OCaml with these points they raise? Wouldn't almost any strongly typed language do? Wouldn't TypeScript also tick all these boxes? EDIT: I wouldn't choose TypeScript either for this type of use case, but not for the reasons they state, that's my point
OCaml has a much stronger type system than Typescript.
The real question is "why not Rust?". I've used both a fair bit and OCaml's only major advantage IMO is compile time. That doesn't seem compelling enough to put up with the downsides to me.
Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#15Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#16> Most systems handle this defensively with locks and runtime validation. So i work at an org with 1000s of terraform repos, we use the enterprise version which locks workspaces during runs etc. everywhere else i’ve worked, we either just use some lock mechanism or only do applies from a specific branch and CI enforces they run one at a time. My question is: who is this aimed at and what problem is it actually solvin…
Agreed and well said!
Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#17I like OCaml and have written the "why we chose XYZ language" posts. Most of the time the real answer is "we like it and it makes us feel good to use it". Like the answers aren't wrong per se but they're more post-facto justifications. And that's perfectly fine! I think we should normalize saying that tech stack choices are subjective and preference-based. We're not robots. The social and aesthetic parts of a stack m…
Definitely agree. Most teams don't choose a language for purely rational reasons, and we're not pretending we did.
We like OCaml, it makes us excited to build. We know the language deeply, which means we can reason about performance and behavior before we run the code. We can onboard new engineers quickly because the type system forces clarity.
The runtime is simple enough that we can predict what it's doing. So yes, part of it is that OCaml feels good to use. But that feeling comes from years of watching it make complex systems simpler to reason about, not harder.
Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#18> Most systems handle this defensively with locks and runtime validation. So i work at an org with 1000s of terraform repos, we use the enterprise version which locks workspaces during runs etc. everywhere else i’ve worked, we either just use some lock mechanism or only do applies from a specific branch and CI enforces they run one at a time. My question is: who is this aimed at and what problem is it actually solvin…
Hello, CTO of Terrateam here, the creators of Stategraph.
As you said, the common practice is to use locks on state to guarantee that operations don't step on each other. This works, however the cost is that if it takes 5 minutes to perform an operation, only one person can be doing an operation at a time, so if 5 devs are modifying infrastructure, the last one has to wait 25 minutes just to get back the plan, even if those 5 people are not changing overlapping resources in the state.
The way that most people deal with this is they take their infrastructure and break it up across multiple root modules, and then when those root modules, break it up again, etc.
Stategraph is solving the problem of getting all of the performance benefits of breaking up your root modules without breaking up your root modules. It dynamically determines which resources each of those 5 devs are operation on and, if the resources do not overlap, can run them in parallel.
That means Stategraph is manipulating state in a bit more sophisticated way than standard Terraform/Tofu, and we need to be careful we don't get it wrong.
Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#19I like OCaml and have written the "why we chose XYZ language" posts. Most of the time the real answer is "we like it and it makes us feel good to use it". Like the answers aren't wrong per se but they're more post-facto justifications. And that's perfectly fine! I think we should normalize saying that tech stack choices are subjective and preference-based. We're not robots. The social and aesthetic parts of a stack m…
The first comments here are people reading this as if the authors are saying only OCaml can do this. They aren't.
Exactly! OCaml is the language I like to solve problems in, and I'm excited to solve problems in, so that's why Terrateam uses OCaml (I'm the CTO). You can do a lot (but not all) of this in Go, or TypeScript, but I don't get excited about those languages. Certainly I'll use them if I have to (our UI is written in Svelte) but building your own company is a grind, and using OCaml makes the grind just a bit more exciting, and that's an edge.
Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph
#20I don't really get what's special about OCaml with these points they raise? Wouldn't almost any strongly typed language do? Wouldn't TypeScript also tick all these boxes? EDIT: I wouldn't choose TypeScript either for this type of use case, but not for the reasons they state, that's my point
Functional programming is immutable by default. TypeScript and many other typed languages don't really stop you from clobbering things, particularly with concurrency. Rust does. But immutability with GC is a lot easier to use than Rust if you don't need the performance of Rust.
But what is functional besides haskell? Purescript? Elm I guess. Ocaml is not. It has for loops even. You can write pure functional ocaml but people don't. It mattered a lot less when it didn't have true concurrency, but now clobbering things in ocaml is quite possible.