Comment by chris_armstrong

The OCaml syntax was discussed a long time ago between the developers and the whole community and the agreement was that the community is happy with the current/original syntax. ReasonML was created for those developers more familiar with Javascript, but it was not very successful in attracting new developers as they usually look more at the semantics of the language along with the syntax (and that is where OCaml's type system shines). Strictly speaking, there is a long list of ML family languages that share many properties of OCaml's syntax. However, what is a ‘reasonable’ syntax is open to debate. Javascript and Python were not mainstream languages when Ocaml was developed and it made much more sense to create a syntax in line with the ML family of powerful languages available at the time. Once you program a bit in OCaml syntax is not a problem, learning to program in a functional paradigm and getting the most out of it is the real challenge.

How can you access the full 64 bits if "one bit is reserved for the OCaml runtime"? (the link is in the my original post's thread)

1. I've found it to be extremely buggy, often in confusing ways. E.g. there was a bug where it couldn't find `curl` if you were in more than 32 Linux groups.

2. It has some kind of pinning system that is completely incomprehensible. For example you can do `opam install .`, which works fine, and then `git switch some_other_branch; opam install .` and it will actually still install the old branch?? Honestly I've never figured out what on earth it's trying to do but me and my colleagues have had constant issues with it.

> Compared to what?

Compared to good tooling like Cargo and Go and NPM and uv (if you give it some slack for having to deal with Python).

It's better than Pip, but that doesn't take much.

Thanks. They're not in the basic-data-types, but you are correct, they are available in the stdint module, which has a pub date from Oct 19, 2022. It can be found here:

> https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/stdint/

It's been a while since I investigated OCaml, so I guess this is a recent addition and is obviously not a part of the standard integer data types (and, therefore, the standard language), that not only have no signedness, and only have Int32 and Int64, but have "one bit is reserved for OCaml's runtime operation".

The stdint package also depends on Jane Street's "Dune", which they call a "Fast, portable, and opinionated build system". I don't need or want or need any of its capabilities.

As well, the issues page for stdint has a ton of more than year old open issues, so, as I understood, OCaml does not, like F#, have all sizes and signedness of ints available in their fundamental language. Such a language is simply not a good fit for system-level programming, where bit-banging is essential. Such low-level int handling is simply not a part of the language, however much it may be able to be bolted on.

I just want to install a programming language, with its base compiler and libraries and preferably with man pages, open some files in vi, compile, correct, and run. That is my requirement for a "systems-level" language.

I would never in my life consider OCaml with opam and Dune for building systems-level software. I wish it could, but it's not copacetic for the task, whose sole purpose is to produce clean, simple, understandable binaries.

Thanks for helping me understand the situation.

The second version of F#, where they implemented generics, before they got into the type provider stuff.