The situation with Reason is (arguably needlessly) confusing. Reason is just an alternative syntax for OCaml, despite being often advertised in combination with

The situation with Reason is (arguably needlessly) confusing. Reason is just an alternative syntax for OCaml, despite being often advertised in combination with BuckleScript (the more recent OCaml to JS compiler). You can use either Reason or OCaml syntax with either BuckleScript, js_of_ocaml or natively (very confusingly there's also a new slightly different version of Reason for BuckleScript only which you can ignore). The advantages of Reason syntax over OCaml are pretty much limited to a nice JSX syntax. For frontend development BuckleScript is probably better than js_of_ocaml in terms of integration with JS, bundle size and number of users. For backend development I personally think native OCaml (or Reason if you prefer it) is definitely usable. But you could also try BuckleScript bindings to node stuff if you really like node.