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OCaml as my primary language

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Re: OCaml as my primary language

#31

Post by ackfoobar »

nukifw wrote: post #13
ackfoobar wrote: post #5

> Sum types: For example, Kotlin and Java (and de facto C#) use a construct associated with inheritance relations called sealing. This has the benefit of giving you the ability to refer to a case as its own type. > the expression of sums verbose and, in my view, harder to reason about. You declare the sum type once, and use it many times. Slightly more verbose sum type declaration is worth it when it makes using the…

In the specific case of OCaml, this is also possible using indexing and GADTs or polymorphic variants. But generally, referencing as its own type serves different purposes. From my point of view, distinguishing between sum branches often tends to result in code that is difficult to reason about and difficult to generalise due to concerns about variance and loss of type equality.

Unless you reach an unsound part of the type system I don't see how. Could you provide an example?

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#32

Post by jimbob45 »

moi2388 wrote: post #2

If I wanted to program in OCaml, id program in F# instead

It's always weird when Microsoft pulls an "embrace, extend, extinguish" but the "extinguish" part happens without their involvement or desire and then we're all stuck wondering how Microsoft got left holding the bag.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#33

Post by noelwelsh »

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel if OCaml had got its act together around about 2010 with multicore and a few other annoyances[1] it could have been Rust. Unfortunately it fell into the gap between what academia could justify working on and what industry was willing to do.

[1]: Practically speaking, the 31-bit Ints are annoying if you're trying to do any bit bashing, but aesthetically the double semicolons are an abomination and irk me far more.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#34

Post by wiseowise »

ackfoobar wrote: post #24
wiseowise wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin's/Java's implementation is just a poor man's implementation of very restricted set of real sum types. I have no idea what > This has the benefit of giving you the ability to refer to a case as its own type. means.

> I have no idea I can tell. Thankfully the OCaml textbook has this explicitly called out. https://dev.realworldocaml.org/variants.html#combining-recor... > The main downside is the obvious one, which is that an inline record can’t be treated as its own free-standing object. And, as you can see below, OCaml will reject code that tries to do so.

That's for embedded records. You can have the same thing as Kotlin but with better syntax.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#35

Post by ackfoobar »

loxs wrote: post #23

I migrated from OCaml to Rust around 2020, haven't looked back. Although Rust is quite a lot less elegant and has some unpleasant deficiencies (lambdas, closures, currying)... and I end up having to close one one eye sometimes and clone some large data-structure to make my life easier... But regardless, its huge ecosystem and great tooling allows me to build things comparatively so easily, that OCaml has no chance. A…

> the end result is seriously faster

Do you have a ballpark value of how much faster Rust is? Also I wonder if OxCaml will be roughly as fast with less effort.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#36

Post by johnisgood »

Milpotel wrote: post #26
johnisgood wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> difficulty to install Use opam: https://opam.ocaml.org or https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Install.html . Additionally, see: https://ocaml.org/install#linux_mac_bsd and https://ocaml.org/docs/set-up-editor . It is easy to set up with Emacs, for example. VSCodium has OCaml extension as well. All you need for the OCaml compiler is opam, it handles all the packages and the compiler. For your project, use dune: https://dune.…

"use opam" is always the answer but in reality its the worst package manager ever. I've never seen so many packages fail to install, so many broken dependencies and miscompilations that resulted in segfaults due to wrong dependencies. I just gave up with Ocaml due to the crappy ecosystem, although I could have lived with the other idiosyncrasies.

I have never had issues and been writing OCaml and using opam for years.

Can you be more specific?

(Why the down-vote? He does need to be specific, right? Additionally, my experiences are somehow invalid?)

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#37

Post by sshine »

_mu wrote: post #6

I haven't worked in OCaml but I have worked a bit in F# and found it to be a pleasant experience. One thing I am wondering about in the age of LLMs is if we should all take a harder look at functional languages again. My thought is that if FP languages like OCaml / Haskell / etc. let us compress a lot of information into a small amount of text, then that's better for the context window. Possibly we might be able to p…

> My thought is that if FP languages like OCaml / Haskell / etc. let us compress a lot of information into a small amount of text, then that's better for the context window.

Claude Code’s Haskell style is very verbose; if-then-elsey, lots of nested case-ofs, do-blocks at multiple levels of intension, very little naming things at top-level.

Given a sample of a simple API client, and a request to do the same but for another API, it did very well.

I concluded that I just have more opinions about Haskell than Java or Rust. If it doesn’t look nice, why even bother with Haskell.

I reckon that you could seed it with style examples that take up very little context space. Also, remind it to not enable language pragmas per file when they’re already in .cabal, and similar.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#38

Post by johnisgood »

nukifw wrote: post #28
Milpotel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"use opam" is always the answer but in reality its the worst package manager ever. I've never seen so many packages fail to install, so many broken dependencies and miscompilations that resulted in segfaults due to wrong dependencies. I just gave up with Ocaml due to the crappy ecosystem, although I could have lived with the other idiosyncrasies.

There is a lot of work on Dune Package Management that will fix some legacy issues related to OPAM, https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorials/dune-package... !! Stay tuned!

Dune is not a dependency manager, it is a build tool. Opam is the dependency manager. By default, Dune doesn't fetch dependencies, opam does that. That said, Dune does use opam, yeah.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#39

Post by unstruktured »

noelwelsh wrote: post #33

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel…

There is absolutely no reason to use double semicolons in practice. The only place you really should see it is when using the repl.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#40

Post by sestep »

Milpotel wrote: post #26
johnisgood wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> difficulty to install Use opam: https://opam.ocaml.org or https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Install.html . Additionally, see: https://ocaml.org/install#linux_mac_bsd and https://ocaml.org/docs/set-up-editor . It is easy to set up with Emacs, for example. VSCodium has OCaml extension as well. All you need for the OCaml compiler is opam, it handles all the packages and the compiler. For your project, use dune: https://dune.…

"use opam" is always the answer but in reality its the worst package manager ever. I've never seen so many packages fail to install, so many broken dependencies and miscompilations that resulted in segfaults due to wrong dependencies. I just gave up with Ocaml due to the crappy ecosystem, although I could have lived with the other idiosyncrasies.

And even if you do get opam working for a project, it's not at all reproducible and will just randomly break at some point in the future. For instance, I had this in a Dockerfile for one project:

  RUN eval $(opam env) && opam install --yes dune=3.7.0
One day the build just randomly broke. Had to replace it with this:

  RUN eval $(opam env) && opam install --yes dune=3.19.1
Not a big change, but the fact that this happens at all is just another part of building with OCaml feeling like building on a foundation of sand. Modern languages have at least learned how to make things reproducible with e.g. lockfiles, but OCaml has not.
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