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I'm always very amused when people say OCaml can't work at "enterprise scale" (let me snort a bit on that one, considering the scale of some open source project

by Drup 11y ago

I'm always very amused when people say OCaml can't work at "enterprise scale" (let me snort a bit on that one, considering the scale of some open source projects) given the amount of evidences of the contrary[1] [1]: http://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html http://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html To answer one of your question. Yes, we have testing frameworks, both for unit[2] (inline[3]) testing and property testing[4]. As for the rest, it's not OCaml specific at all. :) [2]: http://ounit.forge.ocamlcore.org/ http://ounit.forge.ocamlcore.org/ [3]: https://github.com/vincent-hugot/iTeML https://github.com/vincent-hugot/iTeML [4]: https://github.com/c-cube/qcheck/ https://github.com/c-cube/qcheck/

mackwic 11y ago
> I'm always very amused when people say OCaml can't work at "enterprise scale" Yeah, you will notice that quotes that show you shouldn't take it too literally. ;) (also I have no doubt that Ocaml can work in a business. I just saw no one speak about it appart Jane Street, so I am curious) What I was meaning that "a team with a hierarchical organization, not-ony-geniuses, and more than 4 people". Few of the serious Ocaml projects (if any) fall in this category, which is common for all businesses. About the testing tooling, I am well aware of the state of these technologies. I even contributed to some of them. Sorry but it's light. It doesn't cover all the spectrum of what you'll want to test in a product. Let's take your (excellent) libs and see: - OUnit: unit tests - QCheck: unit tests - iTeML: unit tests Where is integration and functional testing ? Unit Testing only test a very strict subset of the "does this work as intended" question. I recommend you to see how some projects do their testing. For example any classic Rails project. You could be surprised. Some open questions I struggle myself to answer correctly: - Mocking modules without having a build mess with oasis - Managing the model in a sane way - Integration testing is an horror And many more that I can't recall now.
- vog 11y ago
  Not sure about the other issues, but I believe this one is easily solved: > Mocking modules without having a build mess with oasis OCaml has parametrized modules (aka "functors"), which provide a very clean solution, compared to mocking whole modules anyway. As a side note, I usually see mocking being used to test badly structured code. Refactoring that is usually a benefit for testing as well as a benefit for the code itself.
  - mackwic 11y ago
    You can't reasonably use functors of all your code dependencies (function arguments mostly). I am amazed to see how the MirageOS team used this, but this method cannot be used for all the code. > As a side note, I usually see mocking being used to test badly structured code. You could want to mock just because you are inspecting particular stack frames in a specific call stack, trying to reproduce a bug. It happens.

by Drup 11y ago

mackwic 11y ago

> I'm always very amused when people say OCaml can't work at "enterprise scale" Yeah, you will notice that quotes that show you shouldn't take it too literally. ;) (also I have no doubt that Ocaml can work in a business. I just saw no one speak about it appart Jane Street, so I am curious) What I was meaning that "a team with a hierarchical organization, not-ony-geniuses, and more than 4 people". Few of the serious Ocaml projects (if any) fall in this category, which is common for all businesses. About the testing tooling, I am well aware of the state of these technologies. I even contributed to some of them. Sorry but it's light. It doesn't cover all the spectrum of what you'll want to test in a product. Let's take your (excellent) libs and see: - OUnit: unit tests - QCheck: unit tests - iTeML: unit tests Where is integration and functional testing ? Unit Testing only test a very strict subset of the "does this work as intended" question. I recommend you to see how some projects do their testing. For example any classic Rails project. You could be surprised. Some open questions I struggle myself to answer correctly: - Mocking modules without having a build mess with oasis - Managing the model in a sane way - Integration testing is an horror And many more that I can't recall now.

vog 11y ago
Not sure about the other issues, but I believe this one is easily solved: > Mocking modules without having a build mess with oasis OCaml has parametrized modules (aka "functors"), which provide a very clean solution, compared to mocking whole modules anyway. As a side note, I usually see mocking being used to test badly structured code. Refactoring that is usually a benefit for testing as well as a benefit for the code itself.
- mackwic 11y ago
  You can't reasonably use functors of all your code dependencies (function arguments mostly). I am amazed to see how the MirageOS team used this, but this method cannot be used for all the code. > As a side note, I usually see mocking being used to test badly structured code. You could want to mock just because you are inspecting particular stack frames in a specific call stack, trying to reproduce a bug. It happens.