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The biggest problem I have with Ocaml is not the language, but the tooling and the libraries. The library ecosystem is not even remotely comparable to go or eve
by crop_rotation 4y ago
The biggest problem I have with Ocaml is not the language, but the tooling and the libraries. The library ecosystem is not even remotely comparable to go or even rust. Jane street core is mentioned as a good option, but that library is the most popular undocumented library I have ever seen. There is not even some normal default structure every library follows (e.g go io.Reader).
Compare this to languages with supposedly "worse" type systems like Java, which has a library for everything and high quality well documented libraries like guava and apache commons. I find it fine to use ocaml for a random weekend whim project, but wouldn't touch it with a 10 feet pole for professional work.
- oslac 4y agoIt is for these (tooling / library) reasons it is almost impossible to recommend it for any project, almost like Nix in that regard for me.
- illiarian 4y ago> like Java, which has a library for everything and high quality well documented libraries Unless it's a library that has been around for a while and is probably hosted at Apache. There was a marked shift in 2010s in expectations, and now we expect libraries and code to be somewhat well-documented. For older libraries... well, it's often "here's a dump of autogenerated reference files with maybe a blob of prefacing text at the top. Good luck."