Comment by dlcarrier
11 hours ago
Is OCaml an especially comfortable environment to work in?
One of my favorite programs, an ncurses-based RPN calculator called Orpie, is written in OCaml, but I've never messed around with it.
11 hours ago
Is OCaml an especially comfortable environment to work in?
One of my favorite programs, an ncurses-based RPN calculator called Orpie, is written in OCaml, but I've never messed around with it.
Well, many of the benefits of Rust, but in a simpler and garbage-collected language. Possibly the best language (alongside Haskell) if you need pattern-matching. Not quite as good if you need lots of libraries or interaction with other languages.
Does Haskell have or-patterns yet? Last I checked OCaml still has the lead in pattern matching power :-)
https://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/doc/users_guide/exts/or_p...
It does have a lively ecosystem in some niches. Formal verification is one of them.
For example, https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/why3 is a little marvel of engineering.
Hey, I've also used and loved Orpie!
I'm not extremely familiar with any of the ML family, but Eric Lippert had a blog series I followed for a while in which he was writing a Z-Machine in OCaml: https://ericlippert.com/2016/02/01/west-of-house/ I followed along but in Rust for a while, though I think he paused the project at some point and I lost steam.
I learned more about Rust (which, IIRC was first implemented in OCaml) than I did about OCaml, but it's always seemed like a nice language.
Lippert started doing that blog series as part of his learning journey when he got hired at Facebook to write OCaml. Just a fun historical fact.