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Reason: A new interface to OCaml

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Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#191

Post by jordwalke »

kangar00 wrote: post #179
jordwalke wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jordan here (I work on Reason) I've mentioned elsewhere that the primary goal for now was to get the tooling automated as much as possible, so that when we receive common feedback, we can adapt to that feedback and trivially migrate people's code forward. I don't think JavaScript's syntax is a selling point and I am someone with a lot of JavaScript experience. I also don't think that OCaml's syntax today is a selling…

> I don't think JavaScript's syntax is a selling point Under "Why OCaml?" on the Reason page, it states, "OCaml has a very mature (and still growing) ecosystem for targeting browser and JavaScript environments with a focus on language interoperability and integration with existing JavaScript code," and "Reason‘s non-invasive approach to the OCaml compiler allows Reason code to take advantage of all of the existing OC…

I personally think that JavaScript is one of the most meaningful and important languages that exists today. This needn't imply that JavaScript's syntax, or its semantics are to be emulated (though we're seeing a bunch of welcome improvements in recent versions of JS). The thing I like most about JavaScript is that it allows anyone, anywhere to easily deploy and share code with anyone anywhere.

So I hope this helps explains why many people feel that compiling to JS is important, even if the syntax/semantics of JS are not equally sought after by those same people.

At the same time, we can't overlook that JavaScript has become one of the most popular languages today. If that were the case thirty years ago, I'm sure the syntax for the ML family would have taken that into account somehow, at least to convey the parts of the two languages that actually are similar - even if only for things as simple as comments. So at least in this V0.0.1 of Reason, some of the things that just don't matter tend to look like things that are familiar to a larger set of people.

I think you've picked up on what looks like an inconsistency in messaging so thanks for pointing it out. I can't speak for everyone else who works on Reason, but I see the two major components (compiling to, and resembling) JavaScript to be largely independent. We can want to compile to JavaScript for totally different reasons than we want some pieces of the grammar to resemble JavaScript and I believe that is the case here. The pieces that currently resemble JavaScript are that way simply because those pieces don't matter too much and why not just be familiar? There are certain syntax features of JS that members of the JS community would tell you were mistakes, and we're not looking to recreate them just for the sake of being like JS.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#192

Post by rixed »

cpeterso wrote: post #102
jordwalke wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

LLVM may be better at generating opcodes, but a lot of things are happening between syntax and opcodes, especially type inference, type checking and inlining (including cross module and now cross functors).

Actually, if ocaml "optimized" compiler have shown anything, it's that micro optimizing instructions and register allocation is not as important as once believed. Indeed, for long amongst "sophisticated languages" Ocaml "optimized compiler" was renowned at the same time for the speed of generated code and for the simplicity of its code generation pass, lacking many advanced features found in ghc for instance.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#194

Post by thedufer »

stuartaxelowen wrote: post #139
deno wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about `verb noun verb noun`? Is the second verb a parameter or is it being invoked on the noun?

It's a parameter.

The rule isn't complicated - functions are left-associative. That's all you have to remember.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#196

Post by jordwalke »

wtetzner wrote: post #185
ubertaco wrote: post #172

As excited as I was to see a big new thing in OCaml-land, I have to say my excitement died down as I read on. I don't really see most of the changes as improvements. Having a different, explicitly-noticeable syntax for mutable updates is nice, because it calls out mutability (which should be used sparingly). I don't see extra braces as necessarily an improvement, given that OCaml's local scopes are already quite unam…

Yeah, I kinda feel like this whole project is pointless. As many warts as OCaml's syntax has, for the most part I actually like it. It seems like Reason is solving a non-problem. When I first went to the webpage, and saw "Build Systems Rapidly", I thought maybe it was a new build system for OCaml. I was hoping it would be a Cargo-style build system/package manager for OCaml.

"As many warts as OCaml's syntax has, for the most part I actually like it."

This is for those people who do not like OCaml because of those warts. If you are one who is already sold on OCaml, it's very easy to forget how many there really are.

Regarding "Build Systems Rapidly": Please hang in there and stay tuned. The syntax is there to help people learn ML rapidly. The Merlin integration and syntax formatting tooling is there to help people become productive rapidly inside their editors. Next, we have specified a workflow for actually building systems rapidly (as in compiling large projects with namespacing rules).

Instead of our previous approach where we just drop a more polished project with many of the goals accomplished, this kind of project benefits from expertise that is distributed across the entire industry and for that, it's better to be open earlier. I hope you can appreciate and encourage this kind of openness.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#197

Post by kbenson »

wtetzner wrote: post #183
kbenson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you ignore the red button that runs you through comparisons of different Javascript syntax to the equivalent Reason syntax, then sure, they aren't doing anything explicit...

That's a comparison of syntax, which has nothing to do with compiling to Javascript.

Whether they have an intermediate step that is OCaml or not is irrelevant. Most compilers have one of more intermediate representations between source and executable. I think providing a syntax comparison to Javascript right next to a syntax comparison to OCaml is a clear indication that they are marketing to Javascript programmers, and the only reason for that is if they intend thelanguage as a replacement or supplement to Javascript.

That may or may not seem relevant to you based on ciniglio comment, but I think it's on point if you follow the thread from it's source down.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#198

Post by nv-vn »

robohamburger wrote: post #115

I took ocaml for a spin a couple months ago and compared to more recently created languages it seems a bit crufty. If they can simplify the build system to be on par with something like cargo that would be swell. Also: having rust style traits or haskell classes would be amazing. Also macros that aren't obscure and hard to use compiler plugins please :) Hopefully it ends up being more than just questionable sugar aro…

Try out the OASIS build system. It's very similar to Cargo/Cabal (although it's separate from the package manager) in that you basically declare what you're working with and it does all the building for you. It's super simple to use and is good enough for 95% of use cases. As for traits/type classes, this is in development with the modular-implicits (experimental) fork of the compiler. It's highly likely that some form of this will make it into the language soon, but for now you can already start playing around with it if you want. It's super cool because it uses the module system to express type classes/traits rather than adding more parts to the language.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#199

Post by nv-vn »

breatheoften wrote: post #163

Is Facebook using mirage or similar ocaml unikernel tool chain? Is part of the goal of reason to make a more approachable syntax available for authoring code that will run inside next-generation containers?

From what I can gather, it should work independently from the Mirage toolchain, but will remain compatible with all current OCaml tooling, so using Mirage tools will work as well.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#200

Post by SwellJoe »

So, I know OCaml is impressively fast. And, I know OCaml is impressively terse ("concise" may be a more positive term). But, I wonder what would make one choose OCaml (or a variant of it like this) over some of the other new or old languages that exhibit some excellent characteristics for modern systems. In particular, a convincing concurrency story seems mandatory. I don't know enough to know if OCaml (or this variant) has a convincing concurrency story, and nothing on the front page of website tells me.

So, why do I want to learn this, rather than, say, Go or Elixir?

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