Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#1

Post by e_d_g_a_r » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 6:30 PM UTC

Announcing BuckleScript 1.0
bloomberg.github.io

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#2

Post by hongbo_zhang » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

I am one of the authors of BuckleScript, you can try BuckleScript in the browser: http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js-demo/

Click Examples see how the JS code generated, questions are welcome!

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#3

Post by fspeech » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 7:03 PM UTC

hongbo_zhang wrote: post #2

I am one of the authors of BuckleScript, you can try BuckleScript in the browser: http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js-demo/ Click Examples see how the JS code generated, questions are welcome!

Are there internal projects inside Bloomberg that use this? It is really great and it is very impressive that it seems that you almost single-handedly did all this. I am curious what moved Bloomberg to start a project like this.

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#4

Post by mercurial » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

hongbo_zhang wrote: post #2

I am one of the authors of BuckleScript, you can try BuckleScript in the browser: http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js-demo/ Click Examples see how the JS code generated, questions are welcome!

From a practical standpoint, what's the difference between js_of_ocaml?

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#5

Post by jaredly » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 7:08 PM UTC

mercurial wrote: post #4

hongbo_zhang wrote: post #2

I am one of the authors of BuckleScript, you can try BuckleScript in the browser: http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js-demo/ Click Examples see how the JS code generated, questions are welcome!

From a practical standpoint, what's the difference between js_of_ocaml?

much more readable transpiled output, really nice (and getting nicer) FFI to javascript. but it doesn't interface with existing ocaml stuff as well (doesn't use `.cmo/.cma` so it needs to compile everything from source afaict)

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#6

Post by asolove » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 7:12 PM UTC

hongbo_zhang wrote: post #2

I am one of the authors of BuckleScript, you can try BuckleScript in the browser: http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js-demo/ Click Examples see how the JS code generated, questions are welcome!

I just wanted to say thanks to the authors of Bucklescript. Not sure if I'll ever get to use it in a production system, but definitely awesome tech. I played with it a little bit and I think an OCaml React app might actually compile faster than the same thing written in ES6 and compiled/built through the normal babel+webpack toolchain.

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#7

Post by evincarofautumn » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 7:13 PM UTC

I was wondering about the practical differences between BuckleScript and js_of_ocaml. Found this brief explanation in the docs[0]:

> Js_of_ocaml takes lowlevel bytecode from OCaml compiler, BuckleScript takes the highlevel rawlambda representation from OCaml compiler

I presume that means different (higher-level) optimisations are available in BuckleScript?

> Js_of_ocaml focuses more on existing OCaml eco-system(opam) while BuckleScript’s major goal is to target npm

Now that is a good idea—npm is a fairly large ecosystem that people are already familiar with. If you haven’t already, you might look into using existing TypeScript interface files to get type information for npm libraries.

> Js_of_ocaml and BuckleScript have slightly different runtime encoding in several places, for example, BuckleScript encodes OCaml Array as JS Array while js_of_ocaml requires its index 0 to be of value 0.

Would it ever be feasible to support interop with js_of_ocaml?

[0]: http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/Manual.html#_compari...

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#8

Post by chenglou » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 7:19 PM UTC

I'm on the Facebook Reason team, and we're using BuckleScript to compile OCaml into the best compiler output I've ever seen. People didn't recognize that my React components were generated, not hand-written.

BuckleScript's author (hongbo_zhang here) has been incredibly responsive and welcoming.

We'll be publishing the React.js binding on HN in a few days. Stay tuned! We (including Hongbo) are all sitting in irc #reasonml and https://gitter.im/facebook/reason

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#9

Post by andrewfong » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 7:20 PM UTC

Previously called OCamlScript? The GitHub link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860815 now goes to Buckle.

Re: Announcing BuckleScript 1.0

#10

Post by jnbiche » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 7:25 PM UTC

hongbo_zhang wrote: post #2

I am one of the authors of BuckleScript, you can try BuckleScript in the browser: http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js-demo/ Click Examples see how the JS code generated, questions are welcome!

Hey, so when Ocaml comes out with modular implicits (hopefully soon!), will they be supported? If I recall correctly, Bucklescript is compiling Ocaml source, as opposed to Ocaml bytecode like js_of_ocaml does [this is incorrect, see below]. Assuming this is the case, I'd guess the downside is you have to specifically work to support potentially complex new features like modular implicits.

I think between modular implicits[0], multicore support (both coming soon), along with BuckleScript and js_of_ocaml, Ocaml will be the functional language to beat in the coming years.

0. For those unfamiliar with modular implicits (Scala has them), they are kind of like type classes, so we won't have to write things like "print_string" or "print_int" anymore; we can just write "print".

Edit: NEvermind, I see you're compiling the lambda IR. So hopefully support for modular implicits will be automatic!