4 ms·

The only program written in OCaml that I think I've used is WeiDU mod installer for Infinity Engine games. Took a quick look under the bonnet too. Suffice to sa

by mos87 11mo ago

The only program written in OCaml that I think I've used is WeiDU mod installer for Infinity Engine games. Took a quick look under the bonnet too. Suffice to say, my only thought has been that should the author had chosen a sane language like say Perl (which seems to be ideally suited to what WeiDu does), the software could have been improved by many, many people.

antonvs 11mo ago
That would have required the author to write Perl. Some sacrifices are not worth making.
- mos87 11mo ago
  well then the functionality has been sacrificed - because few people besides the author were willing to brave hacking in OCaml I presume
  - StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
    Just to be sure, are you complaining about the work done by the solo developer of a patching tool for a collection of old games distributed for free and thanklessly maintained for years because you dislike the language they chose for their own work which I repeat they are providing for free?
    - mos87 11mo ago
      Be sure, I'm not complaining about anything here. Tho initially all those years back IIRC I wanted to tinker with how it installs mods for the Linux native "enhanced" editions. Otherwise I wouldn't even know what it's written in.
  - antonvs 11mo ago
    The number of people willing to brave hacking in Perl seems to have fallen off a cliff - for good reason - so it’s a weird choice of example.
    - mos87 11mo ago
      If falling out of fashion is that good reason then yeah. At least it's not a highbrow esoteric language thingy that next to no-one in the wild used to begin with. I've personally fixed an early noughties Perl script where one of the modules it used had changed its name (but thankfully not the interface, not significantly at least), among a couple of other compat problems. Fixing it turned out pretty straightforward even for someone who's far from a greybeard Perl "hacker".
      - antonvs 11mo ago
        Perl didn't just fall out of fashion. It failed as a language because it wasn't able to keep up with what other languages could do in practice. The people behind Perl recognized that, but weren't able to agree on a solution. So usage of the language collapsed. A big part of the problem wasn't that you couldn't write good code with Perl, but that there were too many ways to write bad code with it. That made it anathema for any sort of corporate development, which is the main driver of programming language progress.
_flux 11mo ago
Unison could be one of the more popular programs written in OCaml. This sort of lead into trouble at one time, as the author chose to use the OCaml serialization of data as the protocol, so synchronization between 32- and 64-bit platforms or even binaries compiled with different versions of OCaml was not possible. Eventually this was fixed, though, with custom serialization.
mhd 11mo ago
Perl? Are there existing modules for the Linux KMS interface? Otherwise this would also be an off-beat language choice, and these days with only marginally more developers… (And I say that as a Perl fan) Personally, I'm glad that this isn't yet another Rust post ;)
- mos87 11mo ago
  No, I haven't meant to imply that Perl should be used for the subj. But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml. All depends on the programmer unsurprisingly.
  - ernst_klim 11mo ago
    > But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml Unlike Perl, OCaml is AOT compiled in a very efficient machine code, has a good static type system and has a good concurrency support. Both are not very mainstream.
jasaldivara 11mo ago
I don understand: If there are so many developers willing to contribute with non OCaml languages, why they don't just implement their own mod installer in Perl, Java, PHP or whatever a "sane" language is?

by mos87 11mo ago

antonvs 11mo ago

That would have required the author to write Perl. Some sacrifices are not worth making.

mos87 11mo ago
well then the functionality has been sacrificed - because few people besides the author were willing to brave hacking in OCaml I presume
- StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
  Just to be sure, are you complaining about the work done by the solo developer of a patching tool for a collection of old games distributed for free and thanklessly maintained for years because you dislike the language they chose for their own work which I repeat they are providing for free?
  - mos87 11mo ago
    Be sure, I'm not complaining about anything here. Tho initially all those years back IIRC I wanted to tinker with how it installs mods for the Linux native "enhanced" editions. Otherwise I wouldn't even know what it's written in.
- antonvs 11mo ago
  The number of people willing to brave hacking in Perl seems to have fallen off a cliff - for good reason - so it’s a weird choice of example.
  - mos87 11mo ago
    If falling out of fashion is that good reason then yeah. At least it's not a highbrow esoteric language thingy that next to no-one in the wild used to begin with. I've personally fixed an early noughties Perl script where one of the modules it used had changed its name (but thankfully not the interface, not significantly at least), among a couple of other compat problems. Fixing it turned out pretty straightforward even for someone who's far from a greybeard Perl "hacker".
    - antonvs 11mo ago
      Perl didn't just fall out of fashion. It failed as a language because it wasn't able to keep up with what other languages could do in practice. The people behind Perl recognized that, but weren't able to agree on a solution. So usage of the language collapsed. A big part of the problem wasn't that you couldn't write good code with Perl, but that there were too many ways to write bad code with it. That made it anathema for any sort of corporate development, which is the main driver of programming language progress.

_flux 11mo ago

Unison could be one of the more popular programs written in OCaml. This sort of lead into trouble at one time, as the author chose to use the OCaml serialization of data as the protocol, so synchronization between 32- and 64-bit platforms or even binaries compiled with different versions of OCaml was not possible. Eventually this was fixed, though, with custom serialization.

mhd 11mo ago

Perl? Are there existing modules for the Linux KMS interface? Otherwise this would also be an off-beat language choice, and these days with only marginally more developers… (And I say that as a Perl fan) Personally, I'm glad that this isn't yet another Rust post ;)

mos87 11mo ago
No, I haven't meant to imply that Perl should be used for the subj. But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml. All depends on the programmer unsurprisingly.
- ernst_klim 11mo ago
  > But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml Unlike Perl, OCaml is AOT compiled in a very efficient machine code, has a good static type system and has a good concurrency support. Both are not very mainstream.

jasaldivara 11mo ago

I don understand: If there are so many developers willing to contribute with non OCaml languages, why they don't just implement their own mod installer in Perl, Java, PHP or whatever a "sane" language is?