OCaml is fantastic, but I avoided it and went with Rust for many projects because it had no multicore story and no green threads for a very long time. But it has that now, and I wish I could go back and start everything over in OCaml.
Why I love OCaml (2023)
41–50 of 313 posts
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
F# is a practical choice but the language features are quite far behind OCaml now. {Ecosystem, Functors} - choose 1
From an outsider's perspective, it feels like Ocaml has more active development of features, between the new effects system they added in 5 and all the work Janestreet is doing to let Ocaml developers have more control over performance. F# is not stagnant thankfully, it gets updates with each new version of dotnet (though I haven't checked what is coming with dotnet 10), but I don't recall anything on the level of th…
Applicative Computation Expressions are a big deal (added in F# 5). Recent changes have been smaller in scope.
Unfortunately lots of the more advanced stuff seems to be blocked on C# team making a decision. They want a smooth interop story.
But F# remains a solid choice for general purpose programming. It's fast, stable and .NET is mainstream.
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#43As 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.
What spectrum? Language practicality? Popularity?
OCaml has some high profile use at Jane Street which is a major fintech firm. Haskell is more research oriented. Both are cool, but wouldn't be my choice for most uses.
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost there, but in the meantime supporting a casual squillion dollars of trades at JS
Yes and they had to basically build their own version of the compiler to keep everything from falling over ( https://oxcaml.org/ ).
> Our hope is that these extensions can over time be contributed to upstream OCaml.
Yeah, its more just extensions to support their use cases at scale. Think of it more as bleeding edge ocmal, once they work out kinks/concerns they'll get merged back into the language OR if it remains ultra specific it'll stay in oxcaml.
Not a complete own version lol
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#45As 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.
My team still has 8 year old Haskell systems in production. We pivoted away from the language a few years ago, which I discuss here a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746386
I personally love ML languages and would be happy to keep developing in them, but the ecosystem support can be a bit of a hassle if you aren't willing to invest in writing and maintaining libraries yourself.
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#46OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/
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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#47One of the best P2P clients ever created is written in OCaml: https://github.com/ygrek/mldonkey
I'm still surprised it can do so many things so well, so fast.
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
From an outsider's perspective, it feels like Ocaml has more active development of features, between the new effects system they added in 5 and all the work Janestreet is doing to let Ocaml developers have more control over performance. F# is not stagnant thankfully, it gets updates with each new version of dotnet (though I haven't checked what is coming with dotnet 10), but I don't recall anything on the level of th…
Applicative Computation Expressions are a big deal (added in F# 5). Recent changes have been smaller in scope. Unfortunately lots of the more advanced stuff seems to be blocked on C# team making a decision. They want a smooth interop story. But F# remains a solid choice for general purpose programming. It's fast, stable and .NET is mainstream.
Oh yeah I love f#, I need to find more excuses to use it. I just wish it felt like MS was willing to invest more into it. But at least they have not abandoned it and continue to put some resources into its ongoing growth.
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#49OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/
Almost there, but in the meantime supporting a casual squillion dollars of trades at JS
Yeah, but when these things happen I ask myself, is Jane Street successful because of ocaml, or did they just happen to pick ocaml and then make it work?
There might be some power in attracting all the people who happen to love ocaml, if there are enough of competent people to staff your company, but that's more a case of cornering a small niche than picking on technical merits
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and they had to basically build their own version of the compiler to keep everything from falling over ( https://oxcaml.org/ ).
> Our hope is that these extensions can over time be contributed to upstream OCaml. Yeah, its more just extensions to support their use cases at scale. Think of it more as bleeding edge ocmal, once they work out kinks/concerns they'll get merged back into the language OR if it remains ultra specific it'll stay in oxcaml. Not a complete own version lol
Yes but the context of the thread is OCaml being "almost there". Having to build this stuff in-house is pretty good evidence.