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I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4

I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code. I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

siwatanejo 4mo ago
IMO OCaml is mind-bending (e.g. go figure out the 'in' keyword, I still don't understand it), F# is much easier/simpler.
- tuvix 4mo ago
  Never used OCaml but it seems like a way to chain together expressions using the same variable name? Seems odd but I could see myself using it
- debugnik 4mo ago
  The 'in' keyword is purely syntax, like semicolons/newlines or braces in your language of choice.
  - siwatanejo 4mo ago
    Yeah and it's fucking ugly and unreadable, it shouldn't be allowed.
    - mega_dean 4mo ago
      That was my reaction at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Some of the other bizarre syntax bothered me for much longer, like using semicolons for list separators, eg [1;2;3] instead of [1,2,3]. I briefly tried to use Reason since it “fixed” a lot of my biggest issues with the syntax, but it wasn’t worth it overall so I went back to plain ocaml pretty quickly. I didn’t look very closely at F# at the time, but I remember thinking it looked like “ocaml with more normal syntax”.
- spider-mario 4mo ago
  `let <var> = <expr> in <expr>` is an expression. Top-level bindings are just `let <var> = <expr>`. That’s pretty much all there is to it. let fac = let rec fac' acc = function | 0 -> acc | n -> fac' (n * acc) (n - 1) in fac' 1 let seven = let four = 4 and three = 3 in four + three https://ideone.com/HpTrI4 https://ideone.com/HpTrI4
- shikck200 4mo ago
  Ocaml is just an ML in the traditional sense. It keep scope without curlies. There is really not much else to it.

siwatanejo 4mo ago

IMO OCaml is mind-bending (e.g. go figure out the 'in' keyword, I still don't understand it), F# is much easier/simpler.

tuvix 4mo ago
Never used OCaml but it seems like a way to chain together expressions using the same variable name? Seems odd but I could see myself using it
debugnik 4mo ago
The 'in' keyword is purely syntax, like semicolons/newlines or braces in your language of choice.
- siwatanejo 4mo ago
  Yeah and it's fucking ugly and unreadable, it shouldn't be allowed.
  - mega_dean 4mo ago
    That was my reaction at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Some of the other bizarre syntax bothered me for much longer, like using semicolons for list separators, eg [1;2;3] instead of [1,2,3]. I briefly tried to use Reason since it “fixed” a lot of my biggest issues with the syntax, but it wasn’t worth it overall so I went back to plain ocaml pretty quickly. I didn’t look very closely at F# at the time, but I remember thinking it looked like “ocaml with more normal syntax”.
spider-mario 4mo ago
`let <var> = <expr> in <expr>` is an expression. Top-level bindings are just `let <var> = <expr>`. That’s pretty much all there is to it. let fac = let rec fac' acc = function | 0 -> acc | n -> fac' (n * acc) (n - 1) in fac' 1 let seven = let four = 4 and three = 3 in four + three https://ideone.com/HpTrI4 https://ideone.com/HpTrI4
shikck200 4mo ago
Ocaml is just an ML in the traditional sense. It keep scope without curlies. There is really not much else to it.