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Real World OCaml

realworldocaml.org

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Re: Real World OCaml

#51

Post by thinkpad20 »

srean wrote: post #33

For the early adopters and experimenters amongst you, you might like Felix http://felix-lang.org/share/src/web/tutorial.fdoc It is a whole program optimized, strongly typed, polymorphic, ML like language that can interact effortlessly with C and C++ code and has coroutines baked in. Its own demo webserver is based on coroutines. It uses a mix of lazy and eager evaluation for performance and compiles down to C++. Exec…

This looks really awesome! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Why is this so much under the radar? It seems like it would have a ton going for it.

Re: Real World OCaml

#52

Post by technomancy »

avsm wrote: post #46
technomancy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pretty impressed with how a single `open Core.Std` line you can basically do the whole "tear out the standard library and replace with something nice" on a per-module basis. Unfortunately it has the side-effect of making small native binaries impossible, but depending on the project it's nice to have the choice.

> has the side-effect of making small native binaries impossible fear not; support for module aliases in signatures will resolve that problem quite soon, and quite elegantly too.

That would be fantastic; looking forward to it.

Re: Real World OCaml

#53

Post by edwintorok »

kenko wrote: post #50
edwintorok wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to use a functional language on Unix, _and_ have a type system, _and_ avoid JVM/.Net then you don't have many choices. There is Haskell of course, but it is lazy by default, which makes it harder to reason about how your program will execute, and how much space it'll use. Rust is something interesting to keep an eye on, but AFAIK it is not ready yet for production use. Hence I prefer OCaml.

Why OCaml over ML?

I was shown some OCaml code at the university, so learning OCaml later seemed easier than Standard ML. Also I use Debian, and after a quick look at the repositories it has far more libraries for OCaml (-ocaml-dev) than for Standard ML, which tipped the balance in favour of OCaml as the language that I wanted to learn.

Why did I stick with OCaml after that? Mostly for two reasons: there are some libraries that I like (OCamlnet, Lwt, just to mention a few), and the community appears to be more active in recent years (lots of work on build systems, packaging, new libraries coming out, user meetings, etc.).

TBH I never followed the Standard ML community, so I don't know if its similar.

Re: Real World OCaml

#54

Post by srean »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #51
srean wrote: post #33

For the early adopters and experimenters amongst you, you might like Felix http://felix-lang.org/share/src/web/tutorial.fdoc It is a whole program optimized, strongly typed, polymorphic, ML like language that can interact effortlessly with C and C++ code and has coroutines baked in. Its own demo webserver is based on coroutines. It uses a mix of lazy and eager evaluation for performance and compiles down to C++. Exec…

This looks really awesome! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Why is this so much under the radar? It seems like it would have a ton going for it.

Lack of marketing I guess, not many users, and may be because people panic when they cannot immediately find the thing they are familiar with, for example OO hierarchies, dynamic types. Plus I found it hard to understand till I got a rudimentary understanding of OCaML, and Haskell's typeclasses. So its not ready to be used by everyone.

To do something nontrivial with it you would need to be on the mailing list though.

@dllthomas as far as I know OCaML doesnt, by no standards am I an OCaML user, although want to get better.

Re: Real World OCaml

#55

Post by edwintorok »

bsg75 wrote: post #10
luciafredo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the other new book, which is for a different audience: ( http://www.ocaml-book.com )

How do the audiences differ? Experience / newcomers vs experienced? Edit: Deciding which to read first.

I did read (and comment a bit) on the 'Real World Ocaml' beta book, but I've already known and used the language for quite some time before, so I can't really judge which book would be better for a beginner. Take this with a grain of salt:

"OCaml from the very beginning" seems to focus more on teaching the language itself. If you've never used OCaml before then this might be the place to start.

"Real World OCaml" in addition to teaching the basics of the language has some intermediate-level chapters (dealing with json, S-expressions, asynchronous events, parsing), and some advanced-level chapters (GC, compiler frontend/backend). I definitely recommend reading it at some point.

Re: Real World OCaml

#56

Post by jimbokun »

elehack wrote: post #35
ralphc wrote: post #17

In my progression of Haskell-OCaml-Common Lisp-Clojure-Scala, I remember OCaml having odd edge cases, modules of functors or some such that didn't really help me in solving real world problems (this was 2007-2008 so my memory could be off). I'm currently a fan of Scala, which has all the functional and Algebraic Data Type goodness I remember from OCaml but is more "practical", more companies and projects are using it…

It depends on what you are working on. OCaml lets you interact more closely with Unix and with C libraries, if you need that. It also has a lot faster startup time and lower memory overhead, making it somewhat more suitable for writing Unix-style programs that need to run quickly with low overhead. I also moved from OCaml to Scala for my primary programming, and have really enjoyed it. The functional goodness on top…

Is OCaml, then, a good fit for the kinds of programs many people have started writing in Go?

Native, stand alone binaries. High performance (not sure how the Go vs. OCaml benchmarks look right now). Good networking. More productive and less error prone than C or C++. Less verbose than Java.

Haven't written any OCaml programs, but seems to check the same boxes. Go seems to have a much better concurrency story with channels.

OCaml seems to have a much better type system and functional programming support.

Re: Real World OCaml

#57

Post by dllthomas »

jimbokun wrote: post #56
elehack wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you are working on. OCaml lets you interact more closely with Unix and with C libraries, if you need that. It also has a lot faster startup time and lower memory overhead, making it somewhat more suitable for writing Unix-style programs that need to run quickly with low overhead. I also moved from OCaml to Scala for my primary programming, and have really enjoyed it. The functional goodness on top…

Is OCaml, then, a good fit for the kinds of programs many people have started writing in Go? Native, stand alone binaries. High performance (not sure how the Go vs. OCaml benchmarks look right now). Good networking. More productive and less error prone than C or C++. Less verbose than Java. Haven't written any OCaml programs, but seems to check the same boxes. Go seems to have a much better concurrency story with cha…

My understanding is that Go has a focus on concurrency which OCaml presently lacks, and so it probably has an edge there (possibly a big one). Otherwise, yes, OCaml is a good fit for the kinds of problems I understand Go to be used for.

Re: Real World OCaml

#58

Post by dllthomas »

srean wrote: post #54
thinkpad20 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks really awesome! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Why is this so much under the radar? It seems like it would have a ton going for it.

Lack of marketing I guess, not many users, and may be because people panic when they cannot immediately find the thing they are familiar with, for example OO hierarchies, dynamic types. Plus I found it hard to understand till I got a rudimentary understanding of OCaML, and Haskell's typeclasses. So its not ready to be used by everyone. To do something nontrivial with it you would need to be on the mailing list though…

OCaml doesn't have typeclasses, does it? It's been a while since I've used it, so things may've changed or my memory may be failing...

Re: Real World OCaml

#59

Post by Rickasaurus »

srean wrote: post #33

For the early adopters and experimenters amongst you, you might like Felix http://felix-lang.org/share/src/web/tutorial.fdoc It is a whole program optimized, strongly typed, polymorphic, ML like language that can interact effortlessly with C and C++ code and has coroutines baked in. Its own demo webserver is based on coroutines. It uses a mix of lazy and eager evaluation for performance and compiles down to C++. Exec…

Hrm, what do you think about rust vs Felix? They seem to be targeting the same problem.

Re: Real World OCaml

#60

Post by srean »

Rickasaurus wrote: post #59
srean wrote: post #33

For the early adopters and experimenters amongst you, you might like Felix http://felix-lang.org/share/src/web/tutorial.fdoc It is a whole program optimized, strongly typed, polymorphic, ML like language that can interact effortlessly with C and C++ code and has coroutines baked in. Its own demo webserver is based on coroutines. It uses a mix of lazy and eager evaluation for performance and compiles down to C++. Exec…

Hrm, what do you think about rust vs Felix? They seem to be targeting the same problem.

I have to delegate that to John (Felix's author) not much of a language theorist myself. It seems to me that Rust wants to be the better/safer C replacement. I think Felix's sweet spot is at a slightly higher level. For example, Felix's garbage collector can indeed be avoided for lower level code, it was meant to be used as an optional feature, but to me it seems it requires more than superficial knowledge to avoid it successfully.
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