I know that it's common to have namespace collisions, but their logo is so similar to Reason magazine's. https://reason.com/
You mean 'un-reasonably' similar ?
Reason: A new interface to OCaml
121–130 of 294 posts
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the thoughts. I would definitely not call Reason a new language, but rather a new interface to an existing language that is already great. Not all languages make it easy to provide such an interface, but OCaml did, and the timing made sense.
I like the syntax cleanups. What's the advantage of using the existing OCaml toolchain over using an LLVM backend? Expediency and interop with Facebook's other OCaml libraries? From what I have read, the OCaml compiler only does basic optimizations and the runtime has poor multithreading support.
Facebook has many projects that are already written in OCaml, and Reason provides a path forward for seamlessly, and incrementally moving projects over to the new syntax/style.
Feel free to take a look at some Reason in the wild, used inside of the Infer project at Facebook:
https://github.com/facebook/infer/tree/master/infer/src/IR
Apart from that, although syntax is the "user interface" to a language, and user interfaces are very important, there really is so much to a language beyond the syntax. I see Reason's syntax as a way to make the really good parts of OCaml exposed to a wider audience, while making existing OCaml developers more productive in their editors.
Some things you might appreciate about OCaml's core language (which Reason provides a new interface to):
- World class pattern matching.
- Excellent type inference.
- Bare metal compilation without a VM, but alternatively the ability to compile into JS.
- Great predictable performance, even without a ton of performance optimizations (because the runtime is so simple), but take a look at 4.03 which includes a new F-lambda optimization pass. Even without F-lambda the perf is competitive with other systems languages, and F-lambda buys you another good 10-30% reduction in CPU or so.
- Multicore support is progressing. Here's a PR from today to add multicore support to the native backend (https://github.com/ocamllabs/ocaml-multicore/pull/47)
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#123This is the new low of search engine unfriendly :-(
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between curried langs like OCaml and Haskell and languages like Ruby and Elixir are that the leaving out of parens actually means something, ie. all functions take one argument. If you wanted parens whilst maintaining the same semantics, you would end up having to do write: `add(2)(3)`
Indeed, but leaving out the parens makes more work for humans. What does `a b c` mean? `a(b)(c)`? `a(b(c))`? If the only thing that is gained by leaving out the parens is brevity, I don't think its worth it.
It would be `(a(b))(c)`. Interestingly, you're already leaving out parens for brevity.
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between curried langs like OCaml and Haskell and languages like Ruby and Elixir are that the leaving out of parens actually means something, ie. all functions take one argument. If you wanted parens whilst maintaining the same semantics, you would end up having to do write: `add(2)(3)`
Indeed, but leaving out the parens makes more work for humans. What does `a b c` mean? `a(b)(c)`? `a(b(c))`? If the only thing that is gained by leaving out the parens is brevity, I don't think its worth it.
But it’s not `a b c`. Rather it’s something like `verb noun noun`. Which is much less ambiguous.
In a language with currying semantics [(((a(b))(c))(d)] the only logical explicit syntax sugar would be LISP-like, so (v n n), (v (v2 n)). That’s imo way worse — you end up with lots of useless junk)))))))) in anything non-trivial.
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between curried langs like OCaml and Haskell and languages like Ruby and Elixir are that the leaving out of parens actually means something, ie. all functions take one argument. If you wanted parens whilst maintaining the same semantics, you would end up having to do write: `add(2)(3)`
Indeed, but leaving out the parens makes more work for humans. What does `a b c` mean? `a(b)(c)`? `a(b(c))`? If the only thing that is gained by leaving out the parens is brevity, I don't think its worth it.
It’s no different than having to know the associativity of an operator. Does “a - b - c” mean “(a - b) - c” or “a - (b - c)”? The former, for no reason other than a long history of convention. Same goes for function application. And you could make the same argument about languages that require parentheses for function calls: what does “a(b)(c)” mean? “(a(b))(c)” or “a((b)(c))”?
What’s gained is that the syntax mirrors the semantics. If you have a function “f : int -> bool -> int”, then “f 5” has type “bool -> int” and “f 5 true” has type “int”. It’s not like in Forth where you can’t tell from the syntax how many arguments a function takes.
That said, I do think right-associative function application may be more intuitive—I like having it in Perl, for example.
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#127There's a screencast fresh off the presses on the info page at https://ocaml.io/w/Blog:News/A_new_Reason_for_OCaml I'm finally going to switch away from my ancient nvi setup and use Atom instead! MirageOS recently moved all our libraries over to using the new PPX extension point mechanism in OCaml instead of the Camlp4 extensible grammar. This means that MirageOS libraries should be compatible with Reason out of the…
Is nuclide good enough? A few weeks ago, a lof of merlin features were still missing. As was the auto-indentation.
The Atom Reason plugin uses Nuclide's system for error rendering (in the diagnostics bar), and type hints. But the actual logic for integrating with Merlin has been completely rewritten in Reason itself, and compiled from Reason into JS to run as an Atom plugin. So there are still merlin features missing because the Atom plugin is relatively young, but if you want to help us implement the missing features, it can be a fun way to try Reason itself (compiling to JS).
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#128I love OCaml, but that's a really nice reshape of OCaml syntax! And apparently things will be interoperable. I am really curious to see where it goes. EDIT: and they want to use and maintain compatibility with ppx. Great news
Interop with OCaml is perfect and should remain so. ppx should work (modulo issues that we're not aware of).
You can even upgrade your existing OCaml source code to be in the Reason style by using the versatile `refmt` program that is included.
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#129> A new, developer experience for rapidly building fast, safe systems. The comma placement suggests that developer is an adjective for experience.
Fixed, thank you @konschubert.
Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is nuclide good enough? A few weeks ago, a lof of merlin features were still missing. As was the auto-indentation.
The Atom Reason plugin uses Nuclide's system for error rendering (in the diagnostics bar), and type hints. But the actual logic for integrating with Merlin has been completely rewritten in Reason itself, and compiled from Reason into JS to run as an Atom plugin. So there are still merlin features missing because the Atom plugin is relatively young, but if you want to help us implement the missing features, it can be…
I love the fact that ocaml compiling to js allows us to configure tools like Atom. I will have a look at the plugin. Thanks for the informations :)