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Why I love OCaml (2023)

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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#161

Post by olivia-banks »

kristianp wrote: post #149
timhh wrote: post #96

> why isn’t OCaml more popular I've used OCaml a bit and found various issues with it: * Terrible Windows support. With OCaml 5 it's upgraded to "pretty bad". * The syntax is hard to parse for humans. Often it turns into a word soup, without any helpful punctuation to tell you what things are. It's like reading a book with no paragraphs, capitalisation or punctuation. * The syntax isn't recoverable. Sometimes you can…

> * Like all FP languages it has a weird obsession with singly linked lists, which are actually a pretty awful data structure This made me chuckle. I've had that thought before, shouldn't the default be a vector on modern devices? Of course other collection types are available.

I'd say that functional programming is probably one of the only domains where linked lists actually make sense. Vectors certainty have their use in more places though.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#162

Post by olivia-banks »

> OCaml is weird in that it’s a garbage collected language for systems, similar to Go.

I don't understand why this isn't more popular. For most areas, I'd gladly take a garbage collector over manual memory management or explicit borrow checking. I think the GC in D was one of it's best features, but it's downfall nonetheless as everyone got spooked by those two letters.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#163

Post by jlouis »

belter wrote: post #101
japhib wrote: post #51

Elixir is the closest thing to OCaml that has a chance at semi-mainstream usage IMO. It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which ha…

BEAM performance model trades throughput for isolation, which hurts CPU-bound tasks, and ironically, whenever you need speed, you end up using NIFs that break BEAM safety guarantees, and reintroduce the exact fragility Elixir was supposed to avoid. In 2025, Elixir is a beautiful system for a niche that infrastructure has already abstracted away.

It's not isolation which hampers throughput. That's a red herring. In fact, isolation increases throughput, because it reduces synchronization. A group of isolated tasks are embarrassingly parallel by definition.

The throughput loss stems from a design which require excessive communication. But such a design will always be slow, no matter your execution model. Modern CPUs simply don't cope well if cores need to send data between them. Neither does a GPU.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#164

Post by jlouis »

pasxizeis wrote: post #38

As a Rust newbie and seasoned Go dev, I'm pretty interested to knownwhere would people experienced in both OCaml and Haskell, would put it in the spectrum.

I don't think it's a spectrum.

Languages have features/constructs. It's better to look at what those are. And far more importantly: how they interact.

Take something like subtyping for instance. What makes this hard to implement is that it interacts with everything else in your language: polymorphism, GADTs, ...

Or take something like Garbage Collection. It's presence/absence has a large say in everything done in said language. Rust is uniquely not GC'ed, but Go, OCaml and Haskell all are. That by itself creates some interesting behavior. If we hand something to a process and get something back, we don't care if the thing we handed got changed or not if we have a GC. But in Rust, we do. We can avoid allocations and keep references if the process didn't change the thing after all. This permeates all of the language.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#165

Post by wk_end »

7thaccount wrote: post #144
wk_end wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could be an OCaml expert and have no chance of making it through an interview without equal talent in high performance fintech and relevant mathematics. Unless their hiring process has changed in the past few years, if you're a dev they're not hiring you for your financial skills, just general problem solving and software development ability. It is (was?) the usual Google-style algorithms/data structures rigamaro…

Do those devs actively use OCaml? I thought most of the folks writing OCaml were writing the actual trade algorithms as opposed to infrastructure folks. My post was made off what I recall their lead technologist saying.

Absolutely. Everyone uses OCaml at Jane Street; pretty much everything at Jane Street is OCaml. If an OCaml version of something doesn't exist, there's a decent enough chance that they'll write it themselves rather than resort to a non-OCaml solution.

Like I said, my information might be a hair out of date, but it's first-hand.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#166

Post by cmrdporcupine »

timhh wrote: post #157
LAC-Tech wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could make a list like this about rust in this place and not be flagged.

I don't think you would be flagged. Rust definitely has flaws: * Compile time is only ok. On par with C++. * Async has a surprisingly number of footguns and ergonomic issues. * There's no good solution to self-borrowing or partial borrows. * While using macros is fine, writing them is pretty awful. Fortunately you rarely need to do that. Relatedly it is missing introspection support. * Sometimes the types and lifetim…

You missed one:

* Crates.io is an unmoderated wasteland of infinite transitive dependency chaos

But my "favourite":

* It's 2025 and allocator-api (or its competitors) is still in nightly only and no sign of stabilizing

I work almost exclusively in Rust, and I like the language but in many respects a) Rust is the language that tokio ate, and b) it has been deluged with people coming from the NodeJS/NPM ecosystem doing Web Scale Development(tm) and its terrible practices around dependency management.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#168

Post by 7thaccount »

wk_end wrote: post #165
7thaccount wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do those devs actively use OCaml? I thought most of the folks writing OCaml were writing the actual trade algorithms as opposed to infrastructure folks. My post was made off what I recall their lead technologist saying.

Absolutely. Everyone uses OCaml at Jane Street; pretty much everything at Jane Street is OCaml. If an OCaml version of something doesn't exist, there's a decent enough chance that they'll write it themselves rather than resort to a non-OCaml solution. Like I said, my information might be a hair out of date, but it's first-hand.

Gotcha. Mine is just some old blog posts and a long talk from the guy that got OCaml started. Nothing like your actual first person experience. Thanks for adding!

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#169

Post by cmrdporcupine »

fmbb wrote: post #9

> It is an old language, and there are a few features that could probably be left out like the OOP-related features, and some libraries in the ecosystem over-complicate things like in Haskell. If one can stand a language that is just a little bit older, there is always Standard ML. It is like OCaml, but perfect!

I far preferred Standard ML when I learned both back in the day, but it was OCaml that won the headspace it seemed.

Ironically probably because it had the "O"bjects in it, "which was the style of the time"... something that has since dropped off the trendiness charts.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#170

Post by abathologist »

fmbb wrote: post #9

> It is an old language, and there are a few features that could probably be left out like the OOP-related features, and some libraries in the ecosystem over-complicate things like in Haskell. If one can stand a language that is just a little bit older, there is always Standard ML. It is like OCaml, but perfect!

I love SML, and came to OCaml a bit begrudgingly initially just for a larger ecosystem. But, I think the object system gets a unjustly bad wrap. The OCaml object system is dope. It is rarely needed and not the best feature for most use cases, but when you want structurally-typed records, or need open recursion (or need to represent JS objects for the amazing `Js_of_ocaml`), they are a perfect fit.
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