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I'm only a recent dabbler in OCaml, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. First off, it depends on what kind of problem you are working on. Support for concu

I'm only a recent dabbler in OCaml, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. First off, it depends on what kind of problem you are working on. Support for concurrency is good (through Lwt and Async), so the situation is not worse (actually, better, because monadic concurrency is vastly superior to callbacks) than in a popular language like Javascript, or Python with its GIL. Secondly, work started on a parallel runtime a few months ago, and seems to progress at a steady pace, so we should get parallelism and cheap fibers at some point. Regarding other functional languages, you are mixing some oranges in your apples. I find Rust appealing, especially with the amount of thought that goes into crafting it, but when it comes down to it, it is intended to replace C++. You are trading the convenience of a garbage-collected runtime for more control over memory allocation, and this comes at a cost. I could imagine OCaml calling Rust code for performance-critical sections, though. Regarding F#, it's no doubt a nice language and works as an incubator for ideas which trickle down to C# eventually, but I for one have little interest in the .Net ecosystem. Scala I find too scattered in terms of features, it doesn't make for a very elegant language. Also, the JVM is performant, but it's a pig in terms of memory. As for Haskell, many OCaml developers have been moving to it in the last few years. On the other hand, you don't switch to language with a lazy runtime with impunity (debugging Haskell is not particularly fun). I find the average complexity of Haskell programs higher, and a combination of syntactic features, popularity of custom ASCII operators and one-letter variable names make for sometimes barely readable code. Not to mention that OCaml is more pragmatic: sometimes it is convenient to write a for loop.

adamnemecek 12y ago
Rust actually has an optional GC. Also, even non-GC code in Rust is a lot different than say in C++ since the compiler can point out a lot of memory leaks to the programmer.
- mercurial 12y ago
  I'm well aware of that. However, using GC fattens considerably Rust type signatures (want a garbage-collected list of garbage-collected Foos? Enjoy writing Gc<List<Gc<Foo>> everywhere). It's just not particularly idiomatic. And Gc types are not Send types, so you can't share them across tasks, which is unfortunate since we were precisely discussing the lack of parallelism in OCaml :) It's not a dig at Rust, which I think is very well designed, but IMHO, it is in a different niche compared to the other functional languages listed above.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    "...writing Gc<List<Gc<Foo>> everywhere..." Rust, unlike Java, has type definitions[1]; there's no need to use the full expansion everywhere. (I don't believe it's even necessary in Java, but creating subclasses has its own downsides.) [1] http://doc.rust-lang.org/0.11.0/rust.html#type-definitions http://doc.rust-lang.org/0.11.0/rust.html#type-definitions
    - mercurial 12y ago
      Yes, you can do that, but it's pretty obvious that if you want garbage collection everywhere, you're not going to use a language with linear types and optional, pretty much discourage GC, and write type synonyms all over the place (or fat signatures), you're going to go for a language where it's natural.
- LeonidasXIV 12y ago
  > Rust actually has an optional GC. Last time I checked (0.10 or so) it did not. Gc pointers were the same as Rc pointers with a proper GC to come soon.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    Rust has roughly the same problem as C/C++: without compiler support for garbage collection, you quickly get off into the unappealing-option weeds. In this case, either "conservative" collection, or smart-pointer based collectors, which have performance issues compared to "proper GC's". (As far as GC features go, you can get pretty far with smart pointers: http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2014/03/automatic-memory-management-hybrid.html http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2014/03/automatic-memory-managem... .)

adamnemecek 12y ago

Rust actually has an optional GC. Also, even non-GC code in Rust is a lot different than say in C++ since the compiler can point out a lot of memory leaks to the programmer.

mercurial 12y ago
I'm well aware of that. However, using GC fattens considerably Rust type signatures (want a garbage-collected list of garbage-collected Foos? Enjoy writing Gc<List<Gc<Foo>> everywhere). It's just not particularly idiomatic. And Gc types are not Send types, so you can't share them across tasks, which is unfortunate since we were precisely discussing the lack of parallelism in OCaml :) It's not a dig at Rust, which I think is very well designed, but IMHO, it is in a different niche compared to the other functional languages listed above.
- mcguire 12y ago
  "...writing Gc<List<Gc<Foo>> everywhere..." Rust, unlike Java, has type definitions[1]; there's no need to use the full expansion everywhere. (I don't believe it's even necessary in Java, but creating subclasses has its own downsides.) [1] http://doc.rust-lang.org/0.11.0/rust.html#type-definitions http://doc.rust-lang.org/0.11.0/rust.html#type-definitions
  - mercurial 12y ago
    Yes, you can do that, but it's pretty obvious that if you want garbage collection everywhere, you're not going to use a language with linear types and optional, pretty much discourage GC, and write type synonyms all over the place (or fat signatures), you're going to go for a language where it's natural.
LeonidasXIV 12y ago
> Rust actually has an optional GC. Last time I checked (0.10 or so) it did not. Gc pointers were the same as Rc pointers with a proper GC to come soon.
- mcguire 12y ago
  Rust has roughly the same problem as C/C++: without compiler support for garbage collection, you quickly get off into the unappealing-option weeds. In this case, either "conservative" collection, or smart-pointer based collectors, which have performance issues compared to "proper GC's". (As far as GC features go, you can get pretty far with smart pointers: http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2014/03/automatic-memory-management-hybrid.html http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2014/03/automatic-memory-managem... .)