Comment by ffaser5gxlsll
14 hours ago
> Today there is little reason not to use Rust and it can cover both the processing side and the payload software. But people still insist on using C/C++. I'm OK with that as long as I can invoice them.
Any reason _not_ to continue using ocaml besides being less popular?
If popularity/mindshare wasn't an issue, I find the development cycle with ocaml to be nicer in several ways compared to rust on a platform where stuff like python is already allowed (I wouldn't call a full-blown linux system, even with limited memory, "embedded").
In general, if it works, leave it alone; but I can think of two reasons to stop using OCaml:
1) You have been ordered to directly interface with some external library that has a complicated C ABI, and you can't isolate it in a separate process and do IPC, and the FFI would be too clunky or slow.
2) You really need to manipulate lots of bits or bytes or floats very fast, or there are lots of them, and speed or memory footprint is becoming an issue. You need to multicore and/or SIMD, you need efficient abstractions, and you do that kind of thing all over the place, not just in a few functions that you separately implement in C or whatever.
As a bonus here's a good reason for NOT leaving OCaml: You can quickly bootstrap the compiler and run it on small embedded machines. I remember using OCaml on a Cyrix 686 with 64 megs I think, it was perfectly fine. Today, the lights dim a bit when I start cargo build.