5 ms·

OCamlPro and the future of OCaml

49 points by budu 16y ago

ajshankar 16y ago
The number one problem with commercial OCaml is the lack of comprehensive library support. Until that's addressed, it's not going to take off. Brilliant language, not very practical. F# is a step in the right direction here.
- kia 16y ago
  While F# is a great language, its main problem is that it is basically MS only. At the current stage of development mono lags behind official MS .net implementation too much in terms of performance/stability/features.
  - praptak 16y ago
    Also, last time I checked only some parts of what mono implements are covered by the Microsoft Community Promise (i.e. promise not to sue you over it.) If there's anything new on this front, please share.
- raphscallion 16y ago
  What about Jane Street's Core (http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13 http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13), or Batteries Included (http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/ http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/) ?
  - Yoric 16y ago
    Go Batteries Included! (yes, I'm one of the developers, did that show? :))
  - plastics 16y ago
    The last time I tried installing Batteries (on OS X) it was a big PITA and it looked like it was dead in the water (this was about 18 months ago). During the same time using GODI to install a xml processing library completely hosed my system after me foolishly granting it root rights, which killed my OCaml enthusiasm for good. OCaml is in itself a really nice language (apart from some warts like lack of native multithreading support) but it's tooling, infrastructure and "first developer experience" and lack of progress in these areas in the last years is beyond atrocious (compared to F#, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby, Python, JavaScript).
mobileman 16y ago
It would be interesting to know what they plan to do. It's easy to speculate l. It would be much more interesting to see ocaml on the jvm
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- raphscallion 16y ago
  OcamlJava is a work-in-progress implementation of OCaml on the JVM, from Xavier Clerc of INRIA. http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/ http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/ There's also Yeti ( http://mth.github.com/yeti/ http://mth.github.com/yeti/ ), an ML for the JVM, though I'm not sure how mature it is yet.
  - pufuwozu 16y ago
    I'm really loving Yeti. It's not very mature but it's a very promising language. It does need more libraries but it's also extremely interoperable with Java/JVM. Very simple and easy to call out to Java libraries. Also compiles to native JVM classes (can be called easily from Java). For anyone interested, I managed to write a Mustache implementation last weekend: https://bitbucket.org/puffnfresh/yetis-mustache/src https://bitbucket.org/puffnfresh/yetis-mustache/src
- fhars 16y ago
  The JVM is quite a bad choice for languages like ocaml as it doesn't support full tail call elimination, which is a fundamental aspect for the predominant style of writing ocaml. So you would either have to simulate the ocaml stack on the java heap (slow and will probably make ocaml/java interop ugly, defeating the whole purpose of porting to the JVVM) or rewrite most of the existing ocaml code in a ocaml-for-the-jvm style that is quite different from normal ocaml style, taking into account which tail calls can be optimized and which cannot. And if you decide to go down that road, you will not gain much you cannot get by using scala right now, the only missing thing is camlp4.
  - melling 16y ago
rsaarelm 16y ago
I wonder if there's any hope of ever getting type classes in OCaml. Then you'd be able to have stuff like a single "print" function you can give any type of value that can be turned into a string representation.
- Yoric 16y ago
  Afaik (and according to Xavier Leroy), it's not planned in mainstream. Now, implementation of typeclasses is pretty-well documented, so if anyone's willing to finance OCamlPro on this, I don't think there's any technological or scientific barrier.
- pdhborges 16y ago
  Type classes or module implicits, that would be great.
noelwelsh 16y ago
A decade ago it looked like O'Caml was going to be the language that brought FP to the masses. It had good runtime performance, good tools, and a decent library. Then the development team basically did no work on the language for some eight or so years, and other languages, notably Scala, F#, and Haskell, have gained ground. It is hard to cross from academia to commerce. The changes that were (and are) needed to O'Caml are not things that will result in publications, and thus don't fit the academic funding model. At the same time they are a precursor to attracting wider interest in the language. It seems that a benefactor like Jane Street is needed for this to occur. Certainly it seems that Jane Street is eager to spend money to fix this problem. The story of O'Caml is a good reminder that in language adoption, as in business, execution, along with a bit of luck, what matters. The world is full of could-have-beens. And on that note, I've got code to write...
- rwmj 16y ago
  I'm writing OCaml just one hour ago. Out of all the languages I know (and I'm very or reasonably proficient in many), it's still the easiest one.
- UncleOxidant 16y ago
  OCaml is not Irish.

49 points by budu 16y ago

The number one problem with commercial OCaml is the lack of comprehensive library support. Until that's addressed, it's not going to take off. Brilliant language, not very practical. F# is a step in the right direction here.

kia 16y ago
While F# is a great language, its main problem is that it is basically MS only. At the current stage of development mono lags behind official MS .net implementation too much in terms of performance/stability/features.
- praptak 16y ago
  Also, last time I checked only some parts of what mono implements are covered by the Microsoft Community Promise (i.e. promise not to sue you over it.) If there's anything new on this front, please share.
raphscallion 16y ago
What about Jane Street's Core (http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13 http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13), or Batteries Included (http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/ http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/) ?
- Yoric 16y ago
  Go Batteries Included! (yes, I'm one of the developers, did that show? :))
- plastics 16y ago
  The last time I tried installing Batteries (on OS X) it was a big PITA and it looked like it was dead in the water (this was about 18 months ago). During the same time using GODI to install a xml processing library completely hosed my system after me foolishly granting it root rights, which killed my OCaml enthusiasm for good. OCaml is in itself a really nice language (apart from some warts like lack of native multithreading support) but it's tooling, infrastructure and "first developer experience" and lack of progress in these areas in the last years is beyond atrocious (compared to F#, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby, Python, JavaScript).

mobileman 16y ago

It would be interesting to know what they plan to do. It's easy to speculate l. It would be much more interesting to see ocaml on the jvm

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
raphscallion 16y ago
OcamlJava is a work-in-progress implementation of OCaml on the JVM, from Xavier Clerc of INRIA. http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/ http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/ There's also Yeti ( http://mth.github.com/yeti/ http://mth.github.com/yeti/ ), an ML for the JVM, though I'm not sure how mature it is yet.
- pufuwozu 16y ago
  I'm really loving Yeti. It's not very mature but it's a very promising language. It does need more libraries but it's also extremely interoperable with Java/JVM. Very simple and easy to call out to Java libraries. Also compiles to native JVM classes (can be called easily from Java). For anyone interested, I managed to write a Mustache implementation last weekend: https://bitbucket.org/puffnfresh/yetis-mustache/src https://bitbucket.org/puffnfresh/yetis-mustache/src
fhars 16y ago
The JVM is quite a bad choice for languages like ocaml as it doesn't support full tail call elimination, which is a fundamental aspect for the predominant style of writing ocaml. So you would either have to simulate the ocaml stack on the java heap (slow and will probably make ocaml/java interop ugly, defeating the whole purpose of porting to the JVVM) or rewrite most of the existing ocaml code in a ocaml-for-the-jvm style that is quite different from normal ocaml style, taking into account which tail calls can be optimized and which cannot. And if you decide to go down that road, you will not gain much you cannot get by using scala right now, the only missing thing is camlp4.
- melling 16y ago

rsaarelm 16y ago

I wonder if there's any hope of ever getting type classes in OCaml. Then you'd be able to have stuff like a single "print" function you can give any type of value that can be turned into a string representation.

Yoric 16y ago
Afaik (and according to Xavier Leroy), it's not planned in mainstream. Now, implementation of typeclasses is pretty-well documented, so if anyone's willing to finance OCamlPro on this, I don't think there's any technological or scientific barrier.
pdhborges 16y ago
Type classes or module implicits, that would be great.

noelwelsh 16y ago

A decade ago it looked like O'Caml was going to be the language that brought FP to the masses. It had good runtime performance, good tools, and a decent library. Then the development team basically did no work on the language for some eight or so years, and other languages, notably Scala, F#, and Haskell, have gained ground. It is hard to cross from academia to commerce. The changes that were (and are) needed to O'Caml are not things that will result in publications, and thus don't fit the academic funding model. At the same time they are a precursor to attracting wider interest in the language. It seems that a benefactor like Jane Street is needed for this to occur. Certainly it seems that Jane Street is eager to spend money to fix this problem. The story of O'Caml is a good reminder that in language adoption, as in business, execution, along with a bit of luck, what matters. The world is full of could-have-beens. And on that note, I've got code to write...

rwmj 16y ago
I'm writing OCaml just one hour ago. Out of all the languages I know (and I'm very or reasonably proficient in many), it's still the easiest one.
UncleOxidant 16y ago
OCaml is not Irish.