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It suffers from a lack of tooling and libraries, mainly. If more people used it, it would create a demand for these gaps to be filled. Anecdotally, the runtime
by evincarofautumn 12y ago
It suffers from a lack of tooling and libraries, mainly. If more people used it, it would create a demand for these gaps to be filled. Anecdotally, the runtime also falls down when you need to use large arrays or strings, or do lots of floating-point calculations.
Even though it doesn’t have all the features of OCaml, I think F# is an eminently practical substitute, considering that the CLR and Mono are both quite solid, battle-tested runtimes, and using F# gives you access to a large body of C# libraries.
Then again, there are a lot of things to like about OCaml. The compiler is fast, the error messages are good, there are some advanced type system features to improve the correctness and performance of your code, and (as with F#) you can freely mix imperative and functional features as you see fit.
- octref 12y ago> the error messages are good I'm not sure about that.
- edwintorok 12y agoThere is some work to improve the type error messages, although the existing ones are quite useful already: http://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2014/chargueraud-slides.pdf http://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2014/chargueraud-slides.pdf And syntax errors are improved if you use merlin, for example for this typo it highlights the ';': let foo; x = 4 Syntax error inside `let', expecting ':' or '=' function body
- lpw25 12y ago> Anecdotally, the runtime also falls down when you need to use large arrays or strings, or do lots of floating-point calculations. Anecdotally from one specific well-known troll. (I'm not saying it is or isn't true, just that almost all of these claims originate from a single individual with an axe to grind).
- evincarofautumn 12y agoI was referring to my own (limited) experience and stuff I’ve read from Jane Street. If people have axes, let them grind them.