Comment by mos87
3 months ago
The only program written in OCaml that I think I've used is WeiDU mod installer for Infinity Engine games. Took a quick look under the bonnet too. Suffice to say, my only thought has been that should the author had chosen a sane language like say Perl (which seems to be ideally suited to what WeiDu does), the software could have been improved by many, many people.
Unison could be one of the more popular programs written in OCaml.
This sort of lead into trouble at one time, as the author chose to use the OCaml serialization of data as the protocol, so synchronization between 32- and 64-bit platforms or even binaries compiled with different versions of OCaml was not possible. Eventually this was fixed, though, with custom serialization.
That would have required the author to write Perl. Some sacrifices are not worth making.
well then the functionality has been sacrificed - because few people besides the author were willing to brave hacking in OCaml I presume
Just to be sure, are you complaining about the work done by the solo developer of a patching tool for a collection of old games distributed for free and thanklessly maintained for years because you dislike the language they chose for their own work which I repeat they are providing for free?
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The number of people willing to brave hacking in Perl seems to have fallen off a cliff - for good reason - so it’s a weird choice of example.
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I don understand: If there are so many developers willing to contribute with non OCaml languages, why they don't just implement their own mod installer in Perl, Java, PHP or whatever a "sane" language is?
Perl? Are there existing modules for the Linux KMS interface? Otherwise this would also be an off-beat language choice, and these days with only marginally more developers… (And I say that as a Perl fan)
Personally, I'm glad that this isn't yet another Rust post ;)
No, I haven't meant to imply that Perl should be used for the subj. But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml. All depends on the programmer unsurprisingly.
> But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml
Unlike Perl, OCaml is AOT compiled in a very efficient machine code, has a good static type system and has a good concurrency support. Both are not very mainstream.