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I think there's a lot of strawmen here, many quite analogous to those used to (unfairly IMO) criticize OCaml itself. Complaining about sexprs, when one's basel

I think there's a lot of strawmen here, many quite analogous to those used to (unfairly IMO) criticize OCaml itself. Complaining about sexprs, when one's baseline is the completely ad-hoc nature of go.mod files, or cargo toml files, is pretty silly. Further, sexprs are a very common general-purpose serialization path for OCaml values, so dune's selection here is hardly arbitrary. Yes, `dune build`, `dune runtest`, and `dune exec ...` do "work", i.e. each command has its semantics, which are pretty extensively documented IMO. Is the complaint that they're not the same commands that one uses with cargo or whatever? You're right that opam and dune used to not interoperate much (or at all), but that has changed a lot in the last year or so, to the point that, _if you want_, you don't have to write opam files at all (i.e. they'll be generated from metadata in your `dune-project` file). Again, well documented, at least IMO: https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/opam.html https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/opam.html The "lockfile situation" is pretty good AFAICT. I've been using them for a year+ with good / expected results. You're right about `dune init` not doing the right things. I believe that's been resolved very recently IIRC, but then again, I can't recall the last language/build tool I used init-like functionality with; I almost always just copy over config/structure from another project I've worked on, and tweak from there. There are absolutely real critiques of dune, but "it's not cargo" or whatever is silly.

yawaramin 4y ago
Hmm, let's dive a little deeper. Dune itself is fine, and even great once everything is working. It's just that you have to mug through tons of documentation that's arranged in pure reference format, instead of in a task-based format, before it's up and running. Sure, dune generates opam files...except for the (some pretty important) parts it doesn't support. I've had to fall back to opam template files in two different projects to express things that dune-project format doesn't support. It's a leaky abstraction over opam format. The lockfile situation is incredibly rudimentary compared to Go or even to npm. Check out https://go.dev/blog/supply-chain https://go.dev/blog/supply-chain and tell me opam has 1/5th of the capabilities of go.sum checksums and their overall supply chain security. I know this was a concern for you pretty recently: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/opam-repository-security-and-data-integrity-posture/6478 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/opam-repository-security-and-dat... Dune init is actually the one really good piece of UX in dune. Being able to run a command and generate a valid dune component (e.g. not having to remember the `(preprocess (pps ppx_bla))` dance and just being able to do `dune init --ppx=ppx_bla` is pretty cool. I feel like 'I just endlessly copy configs from other places' is not really a point of pride. It reminds me of the bad old days of init shell scripts before systemd :-)
pkilgore 4y ago
I'm trying not to make this just about dune. Dune is curtainly BETTER than, say Make n friend to newcomers. But there's a market for programming languages that OCaml is objectively losing. Can we really not agree that the most popular/recommended build tool requiring you to write a lisp to do basic config probably isn't helping draw new user into the fold? I doesn't have to be cargo. But the more it rhymes with that degree of user experience, the more the "masses" will discover the things that make ocaml great.
- sweeneyrod 4y ago
  I agree that dune is worse in many important ways than the build systems of languages like Rust and Go (where they were developed at the same time as the language, rather than 20 years later). But dune config files aren't lisp. They're s-expressions, which have the same syntax as lisp but are just static data like json/yaml/toml (and once you get used to them, I think most people prefer them to those).

yawaramin 4y ago

Hmm, let's dive a little deeper. Dune itself is fine, and even great once everything is working. It's just that you have to mug through tons of documentation that's arranged in pure reference format, instead of in a task-based format, before it's up and running. Sure, dune generates opam files...except for the (some pretty important) parts it doesn't support. I've had to fall back to opam template files in two different projects to express things that dune-project format doesn't support. It's a leaky abstraction over opam format. The lockfile situation is incredibly rudimentary compared to Go or even to npm. Check out https://go.dev/blog/supply-chain https://go.dev/blog/supply-chain and tell me opam has 1/5th of the capabilities of go.sum checksums and their overall supply chain security. I know this was a concern for you pretty recently: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/opam-repository-security-and-data-integrity-posture/6478 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/opam-repository-security-and-dat... Dune init is actually the one really good piece of UX in dune. Being able to run a command and generate a valid dune component (e.g. not having to remember the `(preprocess (pps ppx_bla))` dance and just being able to do `dune init --ppx=ppx_bla` is pretty cool. I feel like 'I just endlessly copy configs from other places' is not really a point of pride. It reminds me of the bad old days of init shell scripts before systemd :-)

pkilgore 4y ago

I'm trying not to make this just about dune. Dune is curtainly BETTER than, say Make n friend to newcomers. But there's a market for programming languages that OCaml is objectively losing. Can we really not agree that the most popular/recommended build tool requiring you to write a lisp to do basic config probably isn't helping draw new user into the fold? I doesn't have to be cargo. But the more it rhymes with that degree of user experience, the more the "masses" will discover the things that make ocaml great.

sweeneyrod 4y ago
I agree that dune is worse in many important ways than the build systems of languages like Rust and Go (where they were developed at the same time as the language, rather than 20 years later). But dune config files aren't lisp. They're s-expressions, which have the same syntax as lisp but are just static data like json/yaml/toml (and once you get used to them, I think most people prefer them to those).