OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
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Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#2[deleted]
Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#3I like OCaml, I spend most of my day to day though in Elixir and I think one of the things that's so nice about elixir is mix.
There's a handful of mix commands you learn when you get started and it's such a great experience. You can crack open erlang application structure and learn more if you want, but if you just want to `mix compile` `mix deps.get` `mix test` that's also fine.
When I first learned ocaml I watched this really wonderful series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUcka_SvhLw&list=PLre5AT9JnK... (highly recommend if you are at all interested) and it's great for learning the language and tooling but it's all opam up until the end when some of it switches to dune.
I think wanting to provide more details about what's going on is nice too, but I think there's a place for "here's the commands you will actually need in your day to day"
Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#4what is wrong with make why does every language need to re invent packaging, building, etc. I think these people have no useful software to write so they rewrite the development stack.
Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#5This is a good introduction to Dune, but frankly, Dune kinda sucks. I mean, it is very powerful, and works very well, but it's too much of a hassle, especially for beginners. I don't want a language specific build system to require two different files to actually be usable, even on very simple projects… I still use it because it is the de facto standard, but I really preferred ocamlbuild [1], which was actually a tool that just worked without any configuration necessary for simple projects that uses standard tools. Where you would need to write a Makefile and call make, you could just write nothing and call ocamlbuild and it would just work. Dune lost that ability entirely.
[1] https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/blob/master/manual/manua...
Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#6what is wrong with make why does every language need to re invent packaging, building, etc. I think these people have no useful software to write so they rewrite the development stack.
Because Make sucks? Because it's really limited and not expressive? Because it's not really a build system (nor is it a package manager or a dependency resolver or...)
Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#7what is wrong with make why does every language need to re invent packaging, building, etc. I think these people have no useful software to write so they rewrite the development stack.
Because there isn't one package system that works everywhere, and even inside a single OS, each group reinvents the packing as well.
Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#8what is wrong with make why does every language need to re invent packaging, building, etc. I think these people have no useful software to write so they rewrite the development stack.
What are you proposing? Because make isn't really good for anything either.
Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#9what is wrong with make why does every language need to re invent packaging, building, etc. I think these people have no useful software to write so they rewrite the development stack.
Because Make sucks? Because it's really limited and not expressive? Because it's not really a build system (nor is it a package manager or a dependency resolver or...)
> Because it's really limited and not expressive?
It's neither of those unless you limit yourself to a lowest-common-denominator feature set. GNU Make, for example, is a Turing-complete, dynamic programming language and a CLI task runner. You can build a build system in GNU Make (https://github.com/omercsp/simple-build-system) just like you can do so in any other language.
Make suffers from unfamiliar and somewhat unorthodox syntax, and inconsistent language design. So it's not a good language, and saying it "sucks" is not completely unjustified, but not because it's limited. Looking at SBS, it also seems quite expressive, although I can't say I ever tried building something in it myself.
Re: OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
#10what is wrong with make why does every language need to re invent packaging, building, etc. I think these people have no useful software to write so they rewrite the development stack.
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