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The road to OCaml 5.0

discuss.ocaml.org

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Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#61

Post by thingification »

cardanome wrote: post #29

I really hope to see more interest in OCaml in the future. It is probably one of the most underrated programming languages. The perfect marriage between state of the art functional programming and pragmatism. A great static and strong type system. Solid performance and an insanely fast compiler. Also compiles to JS if you need that. Multicore support will make it quite perfect. Only thing that is holding it back more…

> Frontend there is that ReasonML/Reason/ReScript thing that Facebook it trying to do. It offers an alternative syntax but nearly nobody uses it because they changed the name and I think also the syntax three times already. So it is all a mess.

"Nobody" uses ReasonML / Reason.

Plenty of people use ReScript.

I wasn't a big fan of the ReScript split, but I think by now it's unfair to speak of these as if they're one community with a confusing story. I think it's very fair to say it's now two separate communities: ReScript and OCaml. It was very confusing for a while, but by now it actually is much easier to understand than before the ReScript split:

ReScript is really its own language now. The compiler for that language just happens to still understand OCaml syntax, for now. The ReScript language and community is focused on the JS ecosystem, with readable JS output.

OCaml has js_of_ocaml. JSOO compiles OCaml to JS, so it's focused on the OCaml ecosystem. The JS output is not readable but you can build "any" OCaml program.

Really that's the main story -- not so hard to grasp?

There is also melange, but that's a relatively new effort in the OCaml community (attracting OCaml-y refugees from ReScript) whose status I haven't formed a view on yet. The idea is to compile OCaml programs to readable JS. Reason used to do that, but Reason now only has a tiny community (and I believe it now uses JSOO?). ReScript still does that, but using it for that purpose is no longer supported.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#62

Post by Zababa »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #51

I write a lot of Scala for living, Ocaml looks a bit outdated to me. Having said that, Ocaml compiler is one of the greatest miracles in PL when it comes to speed vs complexity of the language. Scala/Haskell/TS are not even close. I hear Ocaml's runtime performance is not too shabby either

What do you find outdated about it?

> Having said that, Ocaml compiler is one of the greatest miracles in PL when it comes to speed vs complexity of the language. Scala/Haskell/TS are not even close.

Someone will probably come correct me but what I've heard is that the compilation speed partially comes from the Pascal/Modula-3 influence, since Niklaus Wirth took compilation time into account when designing programming languages. From what I understand, OCaml doesn't allow circular dependencies outside of a single file, and that helps. Go doesn't allow them too, and is also known for its compilation speed.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#63

Post by Zababa »

dunefox wrote: post #34
awild wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java has good to great FP, making most objects immutable is also trivial. Mypy is good to get strict typing enforced but, but I still prefer the native and slightly wonky typesystem to a tacked on one that builds on trust.

> Java has good to great FP Java does absolutely not have "good to great FP" support. It's an imperative and OO programming language that recently got lambdas, no more, no less.

There's sealed classes, records, pattern matching, optionals. It's getting there.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#64

Post by Zababa »

thingification wrote: post #61
cardanome wrote: post #29

I really hope to see more interest in OCaml in the future. It is probably one of the most underrated programming languages. The perfect marriage between state of the art functional programming and pragmatism. A great static and strong type system. Solid performance and an insanely fast compiler. Also compiles to JS if you need that. Multicore support will make it quite perfect. Only thing that is holding it back more…

> Frontend there is that ReasonML/Reason/ReScript thing that Facebook it trying to do. It offers an alternative syntax but nearly nobody uses it because they changed the name and I think also the syntax three times already. So it is all a mess. "Nobody" uses ReasonML / Reason. Plenty of people use ReScript. I wasn't a big fan of the ReScript split, but I think by now it's unfair to speak of these as if they're one co…

> The compiler for that language just happens to still understand OCaml syntax, for now.

I think another important point is that the compiler is a fork of the OCaml compiler. That means that to contribute/maintain the compiler, you need to know OCaml. This is probably going to stay this way for a very long time, since the speed of the compiler is important.

> Really that's the main story -- not so hard to grasp?

What's not helping is that the people around Reason never really said "it's dead, move on to OCaml or Rescript". The pages for things like Reason Native, Esy, ReasonML are still up.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#65

Post by sidkshatriya »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #51

I write a lot of Scala for living, Ocaml looks a bit outdated to me. Having said that, Ocaml compiler is one of the greatest miracles in PL when it comes to speed vs complexity of the language. Scala/Haskell/TS are not even close. I hear Ocaml's runtime performance is not too shabby either

Agree - there are some aspects to OCaml that feel a bit outdated but the language has been trying to refresh itself over the last few years. With multicore (and a minimal version of effects) in OCaml 5.0, certain aspects of the OCaml will become state of the art again. This is just the start though -- lots of interesting features (around effects especially) should land in the future.

You mention that you write a lot of Scala for a living -- just as a friendly (and intended to be a light hearted) riposte, some aspects of Scala strike me as "long in the tooth" too. With Scala 3 the language has done an admirable job to modernize but I find:

- The language feels heavy and (unnecessarily) "enterprise-y" -- reminiscent of the early 2000s rather than 2021

- The JVM is capable and performant, no doubt, but adds another heavy-weight and monolithic feel to the Scala platform. (Scala native likely to be essentially minuscule for years to come)

- The language veers towards a C++ style "I will have every PL feature." Sometimes less is more

- A Scala IDE (metals or JetBrains) feels clunky. sbt is over engineered and slow and given how important it is to Scala, does not give a good overall impression of the Scala platform

- Some questionable language features like implicits remind me of magic in Ruby (implicits are addressed in Scala 3 but I wonder how many years the ecosystem will have to deal with their complications -- forever??)

- The JVM seems to let down Scala in other places. Example (a) Null is rarely used in Scala but it could still pop-up in weird situations and not always because of Java interop. (Scala 3 tries to fix this via "explicit nulls" but there are compromises with that feature also). (b) A Functional style Scala (Cats and others) is popular. But true functional style has a lot of recursion. This, according to me, requires proper tail call support in the runtime which the JVM will never have. The Scala compiler tries to be smart but I wonder if it is able to deal with tail calls without blowing the stack in _all_ situations. In other words, it is difficult to do a "Haskell" on the JVM -- which we can see in a lot of places in the Scala ecosystem.

(BTW, I have pointed out some flaws of Scala but notwithstanding my criticism, Scala has got many good features that make it worthwhile. I may use it for a future project, lets see...)

> Having said that, Ocaml compiler is one of the greatest miracles in PL when it comes to speed vs complexity of the language.

I totally agree with the statement. Its a very balanced language in all important parameters: a high level of programming abstraction is possible, the LSP language server is responsive, the dune build system is great, compile times are really miniscule and run-time performance is great for a garbage collected language.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#66

Post by yawaramin »

bigjimslade wrote: post #52

I really wanted to like OCaml, still do. I gave it a good shot a couple of years ago, wrote a few basic programs and loved it. But it to me seemed packaged like many languages in the days of yore, when a language shipped simply as a compiler, and nothing more. The way of the world today to me seems to be a compiler, together with a complete standard library and consistent packaging system. My experience with OCaml wa…

A couple of years ago, opam was the recommended package manager and dune was the recommended build system–just as today. The opam package index was also searchable for libraries. The OCaml website may have been slightly less clear about these things than it is now, but I think a reasonable user would have been able to find them, especially if they went to the forum and asked. People would have gladly answered questions.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#67

Post by yawaramin »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #51

I write a lot of Scala for living, Ocaml looks a bit outdated to me. Having said that, Ocaml compiler is one of the greatest miracles in PL when it comes to speed vs complexity of the language. Scala/Haskell/TS are not even close. I hear Ocaml's runtime performance is not too shabby either

That's funny because the Scala 3 new syntax seems to copy quite a bit from OCaml.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#68

Post by Zababa »

mirekrusin wrote: post #47
sidkshatriya wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only thing that is holding it back more than that and the reason I have not done many projects with it, is it weirdly fragmented ecosystem. Maybe you are referring to the Async/Lwt dichotomy? Hopefully with multicore (and basic support for "effects" that are going to be merged in OCaml 5.0) this will become less of an issue going forward. Since the runtime is becoming considerably more capable, I expect there to be…

> (...) with the departure of Rescript (Bucklescript) from the OCaml community (...) I wasn't aware anything like that is happening, is it? Rescript departed from Reason, that's all, right? They want to focus solely on js target, because... that's what rescript is. New stuff they're doing looks really good.

The best source of information is probably this thread: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/a-short-history-of-rescript-buck...

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#69

Post by systems »

ithrow wrote: post #55
cardanome wrote: post #29

I really hope to see more interest in OCaml in the future. It is probably one of the most underrated programming languages. The perfect marriage between state of the art functional programming and pragmatism. A great static and strong type system. Solid performance and an insanely fast compiler. Also compiles to JS if you need that. Multicore support will make it quite perfect. Only thing that is holding it back more…

multicore ocaml won't change adoption of the language in any significant way

I completely agree, only libraries in popular domains might

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#70

Post by thingification »

Zababa wrote: post #64
thingification wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frontend there is that ReasonML/Reason/ReScript thing that Facebook it trying to do. It offers an alternative syntax but nearly nobody uses it because they changed the name and I think also the syntax three times already. So it is all a mess. "Nobody" uses ReasonML / Reason. Plenty of people use ReScript. I wasn't a big fan of the ReScript split, but I think by now it's unfair to speak of these as if they're one co…

> The compiler for that language just happens to still understand OCaml syntax, for now. I think another important point is that the compiler is a fork of the OCaml compiler. That means that to contribute/maintain the compiler, you need to know OCaml. This is probably going to stay this way for a very long time, since the speed of the compiler is important. > Really that's the main story -- not so hard to grasp? What…

> I think another important point is that the compiler is a fork of the OCaml compiler. That means that to contribute/maintain the compiler, you need to know OCaml. This is probably going to stay this way for a very long time, since the speed of the compiler is important.

Important to the maintainers, absolutely -- but not directly important to users of course: it's firmly the goal that you don't need to know any OCaml to use ReScript (and I think it's mostly true by now).

> What's not helping is that the people around Reason never really said "it's dead, move on to OCaml or Rescript". The pages for things like Reason Native, Esy, ReasonML are still up.

I assume they'd say they're not dead. I think Jord Walke, for example, didn't want to break his commitment to existing users using it for native projects, so put in effort to help people switch to a JSOO-based Reason (I haven't followed that story, so not sure how that turned out). I think that's good behaviour.

They certainly have a far smaller community than before though, because most people went to either ReScript or OCaml, or kept a foot in both communities for different uses (and no doubt some left entirely).

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