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Why I love OCaml (2023)

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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#271

Post by stirfish »

rkomorn wrote: post #232
gigatexal wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. But LinkedIn lists are horrible for cache efficient things no? I think there was an article on HN from a Golang perspective padding structs or something such that they are efficient wrt to cache hits.

> But LinkedIn lists are horrible for cache efficient things no? LinkedIn Lists you say? (Sorry. (But not that sorry.)) Edit meta sidenote: in this modern meme world, it's virtually impossible to know if a typo is a typo or just a meme you haven't heard of yet.

LinkedIn lists will tell you they contain one new element, but you have to click on a link and scroll through their suggested new elements to see what it is

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#272

Post by rkomorn »

stirfish wrote: post #271
rkomorn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But LinkedIn lists are horrible for cache efficient things no? LinkedIn Lists you say? (Sorry. (But not that sorry.)) Edit meta sidenote: in this modern meme world, it's virtually impossible to know if a typo is a typo or just a meme you haven't heard of yet.

LinkedIn lists will tell you they contain one new element, but you have to click on a link and scroll through their suggested new elements to see what it is

Do they also always end with an element that tells you what the LinkedIn list taught it about B2B sales?

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#273

Post by yujzgzc »

abathologist wrote: post #226
yujzgzc wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both languages have robust and expressive type systems. My experience is that TypeScript's is also more flexible. In Ocaml everything is cool as long as you stick with the functional programming style. But every "interesting" program also has imperative, non-functional-programming parts, and TypeScript has really good automatic "type narrowing" features that make that part much safer in my experience. In Ocaml howeve…

TypeScript certainly has a more complicated and flexible type systems in many respects, but it is not the same w/r/t safety. It is quite common to run across `any`s all over the place in TypeScript code, and there is no such thing in OCaml. TypeScript's systems is explicitly unsound (i.e., not fully type safe) by design: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibil...

Ocaml has exactly the same kinds of escape hatches, like Obj.magic or unsafe accessors. The way I see it. it's a matter of community practice more than language capabilities. Typescript in practice has has the safety net of being interpreted rather than compiled, so I guess people tend to abuse its type flexibility more.

But if you write without the escape hatches in both languages, in my experience the safety is exactly the same and the cost of that safety is lower in TypeScript.

A very common example I've encountered is values in a const array which you want to iterate on and have guarantees about. TypeScript has a great idiom for this:

``` const arr = ['a', 'b'] as const; type arrType = typeof arr[number];

for (const x of arr) { if (x === 'a') { ... } else { // Type checker knows x === 'b' } } ```

I haven't experienced the same with Ocaml

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#274

Post by vacuity »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #166
timhh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the topic of allocators, I noticed some PRs to add allocator support to more types recently...great, now we just need to stabil—oh, wait. Although I care more about not stabilizing a bad API than eternal unstability, if it comes down to that.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#275

Post by vacuity »

timhh wrote: post #173
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Crates.io is an unmoderated wasteland of infinite transitive dependency chaos Well, I'm not sure I agree with that. If by "unmoderated" you mean anyone can upload a crate without going through bureaucratic approvals processes then that seems like a good thing to me! But you did remind me of one other majorly annoying thing about the crate system: the global namespace. It doesn't have the same security issues as Pyt…

I think the error type stuff should be less prominent, and really shouldn't be front-and-center in the standard library, or any library. Error handling is undoubtedly important, but its expression in the API is a different matter. I don't have fully formed opinions, but I do feel that the common recommendations are bad.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#276

Post by boppo1 »

mbac32768 wrote: post #123
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…

A lot of these are learning curve issues, but once you scale them you still permanently suffer with a very deficient, fragmented ecosystem. Until you have built up your own curated set of dependencies for your business stack, anyway. > * Ocamlfmt is pretty bad. It thinks it is writing prose. It will even put complex `match`es on one line if they fit. Really hurts readability. I suggest configuring ocamlformat to use…

With all the issues, how does janestreet love it so?

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#277

Post by boppo1 »

olivia-banks wrote: post #160

> It just genuinely felt like the Go language designers didn’t want to engage with any of the ideas coming from functional programming. You'd be right. "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we…

I am exactly the type of novice programmer described in the quotes.

>have shifted their way of thinking rather extremely

What could I read to shift my way of thinking?

The signals & threads episode about OCaml strongly piqued my interest, and not because I have any JS delusions (they would never, lol).

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#278

Post by davidwritesbugs »

Syzygies wrote: post #209
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest that people interested in using OCaml on Windows (or indeed, OCaml at all) try F# instead. It is still an ML-family language. Incidentally, by targeting the CLR, F# is considerably more deployable (both to users and to developers) than OCaml is. Plus, any old NuGet library written in C# or VB.NET can be used almost trivially in F#. This also solves the problem OP listed about a tiny ecosystem, because…

To decide on a language for a math research project, I implemented a toy problem in many languages: What is the distribution of cycle counts for signed permutations on n letters? Use all cores in parallel. C++ 100 19.57s Rust 96 20.40s F# 95 20.52s Nim 75 26.04s Julia 64 30.40s Ocaml 48 41.07s Haskell 41 47.64s Chez 39 49.53s Swift 33 58.46s Lean 7 278.88s Tarjan, n = 10 Nyx - Apple M4 Max - 12 performance and 4 effi…

F# would be awesome but for the dogs*t .Net backend that made the tiniest error insoluble

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#279

Post by mrkeen »

gigatexal wrote: post #230
int_19h wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why functional languages like linked lists so much is because they are very easy to make immutable without a lot of pain all around. If you implement an immutable vector in a straightforward way, though, you basically need to do a lot of copying for any operation that needs to construct one (the rigmarole with immutable strings, and existence of hacks such as StringBuilder, is a good illustration of the pr…

That makes sense. But LinkedIn lists are horrible for cache efficient things no? I think there was an article on HN from a Golang perspective padding structs or something such that they are efficient wrt to cache hits.

They are, but you don't tend to keep them around in memory long enough. Start consuming the front before you produce the back.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#280

Post by thw_9a83c »

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…

> The documentation is super terse. Very few examples.

I agree. OCaml is a complex language with very beginner-unfriendly documentation. In fact, I would even say it's unfriendly to engineers (as developers). The OCaml community prefers to see this language as an academic affair and doesn't see the need to attract the masses. E.g. Rust is an example of the opposite. It's a complex language, but it's pushing hard to become mainstream.

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