dream VS ocaml-lsp

> It sounds like you read my statement as "run the exact same code in node or OCaml" which I agree would have been very hard.

Hello! Indeed, I did misunderstand you. I agree that it was possible to share some parts of the code between Reason's JS target with BuckleScript, and native target with the stock OCaml compiler. I think a pretty reasonable number of people did that. Actually, it's still possible to this day even with ReScript e.g. https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/w-fulls...

> Between the breaking changes and the general change in development philosophy...switching to the ReScript compiler for my project would have required nearly a complete rewrite.

There were perhaps a couple of minor breaking changes but can you explain why it would have required a near complete rewrite? I wasn't aware of anything major like that. ReScript even supported and as far as I know, to this day continues to support the old Reason syntax.

> you might want to check out OCaml for general purpose programming

Any tips on backend frameworks to look at? I need to write a small websocket service for a side-project and have always wanted to try OCaml. I came across https://github.com/aantron/dream.

The framework I played around with for OCaml was called Dream: https://github.com/aantron/dream. I think it had built-in support for auth, but I didn't use it in what I was doing. I also barely scratched the surface of what it supported. On the whole, it seemed really nice though. The biggest issues I had were figuring out OCaml since I'd literally never used it before and figuring out how to make an HTTP call from within OCaml since the documentation can be iffy. Thankfully, Dream's documentation was actually reasonably good.

Yes. OCaml + all of the 3 OCaml-to-JS compilers support OCaml syntax.

Dream itself demonstrates:

- Server and client both written in Reason, using ocamlc+Melange https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/r-fulls...

That example could also have been written in OCaml syntax, because ocamlc (native) and Melange (JS) both support OCaml. However, Reason is nicer if you want to use React with JSX.

- Server and client both written in OCaml, using ocamlc+Js_of_ocaml https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/w-fulls...

The remaining example uses Ocaml on the server and ReScript on the client, using the ReScript compiler. However, you could use OCaml on the client with the ReScript compiler. Just as with Melange, you would lose access to nice JSX syntax https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/r-fulls...

It's definitely a lot and not user-friendly to have to decide between all these options, but the community is experimenting greatly right now... so it's good and bad, and that's how it is :/

As for Node.js, using ReScript syntax requires you to use Node.js on the native side, but that is the only coupling. If you write your native side in OCaml or Reason, you can compile it to native code with ocamlc (technically, ocamlopt is the internal command; nobody uses either one directly, but the build system calls them).

> There is no alternative to Django, for instance.

https://aantron.github.io/dream/, which is new and used by ocaml.org

> No serious IDE, except emacs

and vim, and visual studio, and whatever else supports the LSP protocol via https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp

> The standard library was so lacking that there is at least an alternative.

While janestreet does have an publish their own stdlib, I personally try to stick to the stdlib whenever possible. Not to knock janestreet. I'm glad they're around and have contributed a bunch.

But overall I agree with you. It's been my favorite language two write in for years now. You can't just reach for off-the-shelf libraries for every little thing. Although the ones that do exist tend to be written halfway decently.

Merlin is great, but it's vim plugin leaves a bit to be desired (in particular, it doesn't seem to use any of the modern async apis from vim 8+/neovim). Personally ocaml-lsp (which is still backed by Merlin on the backend) together with neovim's built-in lsp support has been far smoother for me

Perhaps the README[1] is out of date, but it appears to note that textDocument/implementation is not done? That's a pretty big hole.

[1]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp/#features

Short answer: yesWith https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ocamllabs.ocaml-platformand https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lspand https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/and utop

This is the one I tried and seems well supported - https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp . I've only started very lightly playing around with ocaml. It seems to be working fine on vscode and seems to do as expected on nvim too, at least as far as I configured nvim for it.

Typically I would recommend using https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp which is now the main OCaml language server, and VSCode with the OCaml Platform extension, a combo I know works well.

You might also look into ocaml-lsp for inspiration. Not everything will carry over to SML but it might help somtimes.