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Reason targets JS programmers. OCaml's toolchain is great honestly, it just seems like ~85% of Reason users are more focused on the JS parts of the language, so

by nv-vn 9y ago

Reason targets JS programmers. OCaml's toolchain is great honestly, it just seems like ~85% of Reason users are more focused on the JS parts of the language, so what happens is the new users from Reason don't really do much to contribute to the native toolchain (though any libraries they write can mostly be used with the native toolchain, which is really nice!). The other thing is, most of the compiler programmers came to OCaml because it was an ML, and I think for the most part this group will continue to use the ML syntax and self-selects for the group that prefers it. So in reality, it's a little bit crazy to expect the Reason users to be the ones rapidly changing the toolchain. That said, this will continue to bring more attention to OCaml and hopefully more funding that can help solidify things like multicore, modular implicits, and everything else making its way through the compiler development pipeline at 2mph.

weberc2 9y ago
> So in reality, it's a little bit crazy to expect the Reason users to be the ones rapidly changing the toolchain. That's too bad, because all of the marketing (at least around the time I initially looked into it) was something like "OCaml for humans". The JS bit was mentioned as a footnote, but then when I looked at it, JS was the primary target. I was half hoping that Reason would fix some problems that keep me (and probably many others from OCaml): * Fragmented build tooling ecosystem with no outstanding options (ideally the Reason community would build a standard tool that improves on other options) * Fragmented standard library ecosystem with no outstanding options (ideally the Reason community would standardize on a std lib, but this might be overly optimistic) * Syntax (obviously this is Reason's target problem, but not the most important issue) * Parallelism (well, Reason probably would never address this one)
- nv-vn 9y ago
  I think it stands to fix the fragmented ecosystem by shear force. The masses will decide what will become the de facto standard. For now, it seems like jbuilder will be the winner.

by nv-vn 9y ago

weberc2 9y ago

> So in reality, it's a little bit crazy to expect the Reason users to be the ones rapidly changing the toolchain. That's too bad, because all of the marketing (at least around the time I initially looked into it) was something like "OCaml for humans". The JS bit was mentioned as a footnote, but then when I looked at it, JS was the primary target. I was half hoping that Reason would fix some problems that keep me (and probably many others from OCaml): * Fragmented build tooling ecosystem with no outstanding options (ideally the Reason community would build a standard tool that improves on other options) * Fragmented standard library ecosystem with no outstanding options (ideally the Reason community would standardize on a std lib, but this might be overly optimistic) * Syntax (obviously this is Reason's target problem, but not the most important issue) * Parallelism (well, Reason probably would never address this one)

nv-vn 9y ago
I think it stands to fix the fragmented ecosystem by shear force. The masses will decide what will become the de facto standard. For now, it seems like jbuilder will be the winner.