Comment by dlcarrier

3 months 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.

16 comments

dlcarrier

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Yoric  3 months ago

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.

Crespyl  3 months ago

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.

  • yawaramin  3 months ago

    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.

poulpy123  3 months ago

> Is OCaml an especially comfortable environment to work in?

It is one of these small languages that are not completely niche: it is taught and used, you'll be able to do plenty of things, but there is not the community and resources you find in the big ones or even the mid-sized ones

cdaringe  3 months ago

Certain parts are unmatched joy. However, some things, as basic as printing arbitrary data types, are annoying, compared to other langs.

yawaramin  3 months ago

The thing that I really like about it is that the compiler is very, very fast. Especially when you're in the edit-compile-rerun cycle and doing incremental compiles. This gives people a huge productivity boost and keeps them in flow state much more easily.