Comment by mega_dean

1 day ago

I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code.

I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

5 comments

mega_dean

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siwatanejo  1 day ago

IMO OCaml is mind-bending (e.g. go figure out the 'in' keyword, I still don't understand it), F# is much easier/simpler.

  • spider-mario  12 hours ago

    `let <var> = <expr> in <expr>` is an expression. Top-level bindings are just `let <var> = <expr>`. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

        let fac =
      let rec fac' acc = function
        | 0 -> acc
        | n -> fac' (n * acc) (n - 1)
      in
      fac' 1

    let seven =
      let four = 4 and three = 3 in
      four + three

    https://ideone.com/HpTrI4

  • shikck200  6 hours ago

    Ocaml is just an ML in the traditional sense. It keep scope without curlies. There is really not much else to it.

  • debugnik  15 hours ago

    The 'in' keyword is purely syntax, like semicolons/newlines or braces in your language of choice.

  • tuvix  1 day ago

    Never used OCaml but it seems like a way to chain together expressions using the same variable name? Seems odd but I could see myself using it