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

We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

stategraph.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 127 posts

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#31

Post by pjmlp »

IshKebab wrote: post #14
laszlojamf wrote: post #4

I 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.

Answer is easy, not everyone needs the performance boost provided by borrow checker, 99% of the time some kind of automatic resource management is good enough.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#32

Post by pjmlp »

sausagefeet wrote: post #26
IshKebab wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm the CTO of Terrateam. For "why not rust", I have found the downsides of Rust not compelling enough to use it. We don't need close-to-metal performance. We don't really need the borrow checker, a GC is fine. We are immutable by default so the borrow checker doesn't help much there.

Great choice by way, I feel too many reach out for Rust, because they lack the perspective ML type systems are not something introduced by Rust, rather a long linage of languages since ML/Standard ML.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#34

Post by xedrac »

sausagefeet wrote: post #19
criddell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 excitin…

I've used a lot of Rust and Haskell over the past few years (I consider OCaml to be similar), and I think the benefits go beyond just user preference. But I think it's something that requires experience with "must not fail" systems failing in production, and then seeing how these languages make that failure impossible. The level of freedom and confidence that brings is amazing. And yes, that also makes them more fun to use.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#35

Post by sausagefeet »

pjmlp wrote: post #32
sausagefeet wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the CTO of Terrateam. For "why not rust", I have found the downsides of Rust not compelling enough to use it. We don't need close-to-metal performance. We don't really need the borrow checker, a GC is fine. We are immutable by default so the borrow checker doesn't help much there.

Great choice by way, I feel too many reach out for Rust, because they lack the perspective ML type systems are not something introduced by Rust, rather a long linage of languages since ML/Standard ML.

The sense I get from some comments is that if you need a type system and to compile to an executable, Rust is the only option, otherwise you can use pretty much anything. But, as you say, MLs have been compiling to binaries for decades. One of the first online books on OCaml is for systems programming.

I know that isn't everyone's view, but I do hope posts like this, even if not technicaly deep, at least let people know that there are lots of options out there.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#36

Post by linhns »

IshKebab wrote: post #14
laszlojamf wrote: post #4

I 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.

I don’t like OCaml myself, but I’d pick it over rust here as bare metal perf is not necessary, and time wasting fighting the borrow checker is just not worth it.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#40

Post by IshKebab »

linhns wrote: post #36
IshKebab wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t like OCaml myself, but I’d pick it over rust here as bare metal perf is not necessary, and time wasting fighting the borrow checker is just not worth it.

It is worth it in my opinion because it's mostly a one-time cost (learning how it works and what is allowed), and in return you get less buggy program structures (it basically forces you not to write spaghetti code). Also you have to worry about it much less if you don't need 100% performance and are happy to clone everything.

Occasionally I do still fight it, e.g. if you want a self-borrowing structure there still isn't a great solution (I think Rust should support position independent borrows) but overall it's fine.

Post reply on HN