coalton VS ocaml

Compare coalton vs ocaml and see what are their differences.

coalton

Coalton is an efficient, statically typed functional programming language that supercharges Common Lisp. (by coalton-lang)

ocaml

The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries (by ocaml)
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coalton ocaml
84 118
966 5,127
4.6% 2.0%
8.4 9.9
6 days ago 3 days ago
Common Lisp OCaml
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

coalton

Posts with mentions or reviews of coalton. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-11.
  • How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2024
    It's still… not the same. In CL (and specially with SBCL), we get compile time (type) errors and warnings at the blink of an eye, when we compile a single function with a keystroke (typically C-c C-c in Slime).

    And there's also been improvement, see Coalton for a ML on top of CL. (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/)

  • Embracing Common Lisp in the Modern World
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2024
    Common Lisp has bad marketing (even OCaml has Twitch streamers and "influencers" now), and bad support for general editors, both of which make it a non-starter for most curious people who have an afternoon to try something. But behind all that is magnificent activity for those who got over the initial potential energy barrier. Just to give some examples:

    1. SBCL, the most popular open source implementation of Lisp, is seeing potentially two new garbage collectors. One of them is a parallel collector written by a university student (!!) which blows my mind.

    2. SBCL has better and better support for deploying Liwp as a C-compatible shared library, using SBCL-LIBRARIAN. It makes it play nicer with other applications in C and Python.

    3. Coalton is another exciting development that allows a Haskell type system and "Lisp-1" functional programming in Common Lisp. That means type classes (or traits), something Lisp hasn't really had a proper notion of, and full type inference. Persistent sequences based off of RRB-trees were recently merged, and interestingly, they're implemented purely in Coalton [1]. That means Clojure-like seqs.

    It's interesting to see users of Lisp generating the above ideas and libraries, not a special in-group of committees, "official" developers, etc.

    [1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/library/se...

  • Steel – An embedded scheme interpreter in Rust
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Dec 2023
    Use an editor that auto-inserts parens and that indents the code correctly. Now nothing bad can happen. And the parens are used to edit code structurally.

    re typing: Coalton brings Haskell-like typing on top of CL. https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ Other lisps are typed: typed racket, Carp… and btw, SBCL's compiler brings some welcome type warnings and errors (unlike Python, for instance).

  • Show HN: Collaborative Lisp Coding on Discord
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Sep 2023
    If you like type safety, this project would be perfect for using https://coalton-lang.github.io/ so your REPL supported Common Lisp out of the gate.
  • A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Aug 2023
    Agree that you can use types to express and prove logical properties via compiler; it can be a fun way to solve a problem though too much of it tends to frustrate coworkers. It's also not exactly "low cost"; here's an old quip I have in my quotes file:

    "With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map." --Daniel Worthington-Bodart

    > On the contrary, they're still the most effective technique we've found for improving program correctness at low cost.

    This is not borne out by research, such as there is any of any quality: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ The best intervention to improve correctness, if not already being done, is code review: https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1120495752969641986 This doesn't necessarily mean dynamic types are better, just that if static types are better, they aren't tremendously so to obviously show in studies, unlike code review benefit studies.

    My own bias is in favor of dynamic types, though I think the way Common Lisp does it is a lot better than Python (plus Lisp is flexible enough in other ways to let static type enthusiasts have their cake and eat it too https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton), and Python better than PHP, and PHP better than JS. Just like not all static type systems are C, not all dynamic type systems are JS. Untyped langs like assembly or Forth are interesting but I don't have enough experience.

    I don't find the argument that valuable though, since I think just focusing on dynamic vs static is one of the least interesting division points when comparing languages or practices, and if we're trading experience takes I think Clojure's immutable-by-default prevents more bugs than any statically typed language that is mutable by default. It's not exactly a low cost intervention though, and when you really need to optimize you'll be encouraged by the profiler to replace some things with Java native arrays and so on. I don't think changing to static types would make a quality difference (especially when things like spec exist to get many of the same or more benefits) and would also not be a low cost intervention.

    Last quip to reflect on. "What's true of every bug found in the field? ... It passed the type checker. ... It passed all the tests. Okay. So now what do you do? Right? I think we're in this world I'd like to call guardrail programming. Right? It's really sad. We're like: I can make change because I have tests. Who does that? Who drives their car around banging against the guardrail saying, "Whoa! I'm glad I've got these guardrails because I'd never make it to the show on time."" --Rich Hickey (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/)

  • Compiler Development: Rust or OCaml?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Aug 2023
    > Lisps can be very flexible, but they usually lack static type safety, opening a wide and horrible door to run-time errors.

    People should do basic research before writing something silly like this. Qualifying your statement with 'usually' is just a chicken sh*t approach. Common Lisp and Racket have optional strong typing, leaving the responsibility and choice to the developer. Common Lisp is great for implementing compilers. You also have thing like Typed Racket and Coalton. The latter is comletely statically typed ala MLTON

    https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton

  • Why Lisp?
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 May 2023
    Coalton doesn't actually work: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/issues/84?s=09

    This is why it's important to always look at the issues on a repo instead of just believing what's in the README. It fails to detect type errors in some of the most basic situations

    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 May 2023
    > static strong typing

    Alright, here is it: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/

    > small efficient native binaries

    The numbers are: with SBCL's core-compression, a web app with dozens on dependencies will weight ±30 to 40MB. This includes the compiler, the debugger, etc. Without core compression, we reach ±150MB.

    > The actor runtime?

    the actor library: https://github.com/mdbergmann/cl-gserver

    > couldn't find a way to make money with it. I suspect many other programmers are in my boat.

    Alright. Some do, that's life. Yes, some companies go with CL even in 2023 (https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/lisp-interview-kina/, they released https://github.com/KinaKnowledge/juno-lang lately; Feetr (finance): https://twitter.com/feetr_io/status/1587182923911991303)

    https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

    > Give us an HTTP (1.x & 2.0) and WebSockets libraries

    How so? We have those libraries. HTTP/2: https://github.com/zellerin/http2/

    https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

  • My Thoughts on OCaml
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Apr 2023
    1. There are functional dependencies and multi-parameter type classes. No GADTs (yet?) or existential types (yet?).

    2. Records are being implemented but it's far from being a dealbreaker, in the sense that thousands of production lines of Coalton have been built without needing them. It's just not ergonomic to shuffle around and pattern match against record-like data. With pattern matching in function arguments, things are at least easier.

    3. All Coalton functions compile to Lisp functions. There's a guide that describes what is promised about interop (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/docs/coalt...).

    4. Since Coalton functions are Lisp functions, you can call (unconstrained) functions directly. However there's a lot of room for improvement. There's an open issue to make a dedicated Coalton REPL that can show types and not require COALTON to be typed.

    5. Coalton is developed as an open source project to build tools at HRL Laboratories, so it does receive sponsorship. Yes, HRL is hiring. Feel free to send me an email to the address in my profile.

    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Apr 2023
    Coalton [1] is a dialect of ML with S-expression syntax and integrates into Common Lisp. It works, and is used "in production" by its developers, but it's still being developed into a 1.0 product.

    Coalton made a lot of design decisions that resonate with this post.

    - Coalton dispensed with structures, signatures, and functors. No doubt a beautiful concept, and sometimes satisfying to write, but almost always unsatisfying to use. Like the author suggests, the "interface-style" of type classes, traits, and interfaces have always felt more intuitive, and that different interfaces should require different types. Coalton uses type classes.

    - Coalton has S-expression syntax. No indent rules. No precedence rules. No expression delimiters. All of the "tradition" of ML syntax is dispensed with into something that is a lot easier to write.

    - It should be no surprise that with S-expressions, you get Lisp-style macros. Macros in Coalton are just Common Lisp macros. No separate pre-processors. No additional language semantics to deal with.

    - Because it's built on Common Lisp, Coalton gets something few (if any?) other ML-derivatives get: Truly incremental and interactive development. You can re-compile types, functions, etc. and try them out immediately. There's no separate "interpreter mode"; just a Lisp REPL.

    Coalton's language features are still settling (e.g., records are being implemented) and the standard library [2] is still evolving. However, it's been used for "serious" applications, like implementing a compiler module for quantum programs [3].

    [1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton

    [2] https://coalton-lang.github.io/reference/

    [3] https://coalton-lang.github.io/20220906-quantum-compiler/

ocaml

Posts with mentions or reviews of ocaml. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-17.
  • The Return of the Frame Pointers
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2024
    You probably already know, but with OCaml 5 the only way to get flamegraphs working is to either:

    * use framepointers [1]

    * use LBR (but LBR has a limited depth, and may not work on on all CPUs, I'm assuming due to bugs in perf)

    * implement some deep changes in how perf works to handle the 2 stacks in OCaml (I don't even know if this would be possible), or write/adapt some eBPF code to do it

    OCaml 5 has a separate stack for OCaml code and C code, and although GDB can link them based on DWARF info, perf DWARF call-graphs cannot (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/12563#issuecomment-193...)

    If you need more evidence to keep it enabled in future releases, you can use OCaml 5 as an example (unfortunately there aren't many OCaml applications, so that may not carry too much weight on its own).

    [1]: I haven't actually realised that Fedora39 has already enabled FP by default, nice! (I still do most of my day-to-day profiling on an ~CentOS 7 system with 'perf --call-graph dwarf', I was aware that there was a discussion to enable FP by default, but haven't noticed it has actually been done already)

  • Top Paying Programming Technologies 2024
    19 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2024
    11. OCaml - $91,026
  • OCaml: a Rust developer's first impressions
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    > But .mli files do not help with the "no types in the source code" problém

    It partially helps since it forces you to have types where they matters most: interfaces.

    > And I did not experience any advantage of separate signature files so far,

    100kLoc is already quite big! I'm starting to think I'm an outlier since a lot of people don't see the benefits :)

    For me, it helps because I really don't want to see the implementation when I use an API. If I need to look at the implementation, it means the interface isn't well specified. All I need should be in the interface: types, docs, (abstract) types. And no more.

    Typically, an .ml file will have more than what is exported, types won't be abstract but will have a concrete implementation, and type signatures may be missing. How would it feels like to use list if only https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/stdlib/list.ml was available, instead of https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/stdlib/list.mli?

    Haskell tells you what is exported from a module, but it only shows you the names. To see the signatures, you need to rely on generated doc.

    Arguably, since OCaml has includes, it suffers from the same problem, your ".mli" may have tons of include and it becomes harder to see what's exported without an external tool

    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    > It partially helps since it forces you to have types where they matters most: exported functions

    But the problém the OP has is not knowing the types when reading the source (in the .ml file).

    > How would it feels like to use list if only https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/stdlib/list.ml was available,

    If the signature where in the source file (which you can do in OCaml too), there would be no problem - which is what all the other (for some definition of "other") languages except C and C++ (even Fortran) do.

    No, really, I can't see a single advantage of separate .mli files at all. The real problém is that the documentation is often worse too, as the .mli is autogenerated and documented afterwards - and now changes made later in the sources need to be documented in the mli too, so anything that doesn't change the type often gets lost. The same happens in C and C++ with header files.

  • Bringing more sweetness to ruby with sorbet types 🍦
    5 projects | dev.to | 18 Sep 2023
    If you have been in the Ruby community for the past couple of years, it's possible that you're not a super fan of types or that this concept never passed through your mind, and that's totally cool. I myself love the dynamic and meta-programming nature of Ruby, and honestly, by the time of this article's writing, we aren't on the level of OCaml for type checking and inference, but still, there are a couple of nice things that types with sorbet bring to the table:
  • What is gained and lost with 63-bit integers? (2014)
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2023
    Looks like there have been proposals to eliminate use of 3 operand lea in OCaml code (not accepted sadly):

    https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/8531

  • What can Category Theory do?
    2 projects | /r/askmath | 22 Jun 2023
    Haskell and Agda are probably the most obvious examples. Ocaml too, but it is much older, so its type system is not as categorical. There is also Idris, which is not as well-known but is very cool.
  • Playing Atari Games in OCaml
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jun 2023
  • Bloat
    4 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 22 May 2023
    That does sound problematic, but without the code it is hard to tell what is the issue. Typically, compiling a 6kLoc file like https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/typing/typecore.ml takes 0.8 s on my machine.
    4 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 22 May 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing coalton and ocaml you can also consider the following projects:

Alpaca-API - The Alpaca API is a developer interface for trading operations and market data reception through the Alpaca platform.

awesome-lisp-companies - Awesome Lisp Companies

hackett - WIP implementation of a Haskell-like Lisp in Racket

VisualFSharp - The F# compiler, F# core library, F# language service, and F# tooling integration for Visual Studio

paip-lisp - Lisp code for the textbook "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming"

racket - The Racket repository

dune - A composable build system for OCaml.

phel-lang - Phel is a functional programming language that compiles to PHP. A Lisp dialect inspired by Clojure and Janet.

cl-cookbook - The Common Lisp Cookbook

TradeAlgo - Stock trading algorithm written in Python for TD Ameritrade.

melange - A mixture of tooling combined to produce JavaScript from OCaml & Reason

rust - Rust for the xtensa architecture. Built in targets for the ESP32 and ESP8266