Reason: A new interface to OCaml • Hacker News Board

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#61

Post by larsiusprime » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

animex wrote: post #50

ulber wrote: post #42

This page is completely unusable due to lag. From the other comments it seems this is FF specific. One would think FB would have the resources to test new pages at least on common browsers before publishing. Edit: The fix came quickly though.

While not cool, that's a pleasant surprise to see something made-first for FF! Glad to see people still fighting against browser mono-culture. Disclaimer: This post was written in Chrome.

The lag is firefox specific, he means.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#62

Post by jameshart » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

Wonder if this project has anything to do with Eric Lippert's move to Facebook (https://ericlippert.com/2016/02/08/facebook/ - Eric has also been producing a series of blog posts implementing a Z-Machine interpreter in OCaml to run mini-Zork on, starting here: https://ericlippert.com/2016/02/01/west-of-house/). Eric was on the C# compiler team at Microsoft and previously worked on JScript.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#63

Post by jordwalke » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #48

This looks very interesting. I've always had OCaml in mind but never actually got around to using it in a project. Facebook could have done a better job describing what exactly this is, but they do provide a good overview at the end of the page (strangely!) [1]. In summary, Reason [2] is a new language (correction: interface to OCaml) that shares a part of the OCaml compiler toolchain and runtime. I don't know of any…

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.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#64

Post by thefastlane » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:28 PM UTC

freshbob wrote: post #9

Paul_S wrote: post #5

Website fries the CPU (FF).

Same here. What a piece of shit the internet has become.

glad i'm not the only one thinking this.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#65

Post by huuu » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:28 PM UTC

jordwalke wrote: post #22

jodah wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible, but you are correct. Pegs 1 CPU in FF and while it loads, it barely scrolls.

Pretty sure it was the gif. I've disabled it. Could you try again?

It's not the gifs it's the scroll event listener causing a redraw every time.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#66

Post by zem » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:29 PM UTC

emerongi wrote: post #18

TY wrote: post #10

Ok, it might be the end of the day for me and I'm denser than usual, but I can't understand what is this? Ocaml to JS transpiler? Checked this out, but the reason still eludes me: https://ocaml.io/w/Blog:News/A_new_Reason_for_OCaml (pun intended)

I feel like FB needed it and also released it to the public, but outside of FB, there's little Reason to use it.

it's a really well-thought-out set of improvements to the ocaml syntax, done by people who actually seem to appreciate MLish syntax for the most part (rather than trying to get it to look more like C for its own sake, a la mythryl)

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#67

Post by Sgt_Apone » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:29 PM UTC

ulber wrote: post #42

This page is completely unusable due to lag. From the other comments it seems this is FF specific. One would think FB would have the resources to test new pages at least on common browsers before publishing. Edit: The fix came quickly though.

Completed nuked FF for me and for what its worth it doesn't even load in Edge. Just throws up a "This page is having a problem loading" page. Works fine in IE 11...

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#68

Post by mseri » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

I love OCaml, but that's a really nice reshape of OCaml syntax! And apparently things will be interoperable. I am really curious to see where it goes.

EDIT: and they want to use and maintain compatibility with ppx. Great news

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#69

Post by jboles » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

Polarity wrote: post #44

ulber wrote: post #42

This page is completely unusable due to lag. From the other comments it seems this is FF specific. One would think FB would have the resources to test new pages at least on common browsers before publishing. Edit: The fix came quickly though.

yea, open page, lag, close page. kthxbye

yea, open page, lag, see that it is facebook's usual bloat, task manager, kill firefox.exe process.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#70

Post by jordwalke » Tue, May 17, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

incepted wrote: post #54

Interesting but since they are designing a revised syntax, I wish they had got rid of Ocaml's semi colon. These stand out in 2016.

See the FAQ, as this is a fairly anticipated question. There's some benefits to having some token to separate let bindings and statements, so that the grammar is unambiguous, and it doesn't matter too much which token is used (monkey emoji anyone?) However, I think it may be possible to eliminate delimiters altogether eventually. Because we have the `refmt` program which can convert and beautify between two arbitrary versions of the syntax, we'll be able to automatically upgrade your code if we do find a way to eliminate delimiters unambiguously. Stay tuned.