esy VS book

As someone who wrote a fair amount of Rust and OCaml code, I have to agree with the author.

While working at Routine (YC W21), I was tasked with porting our core library to iOS to minimize code duplication. This was a lucky opportunity to write something resembling a compiler: it took in schemas described with our in-house data exchange library and generated C (for FFI) and Swift code (for the end-users, i.e., iOS developers).

Since Routine uses OCaml for everything (which was a big motivator for joining the company—I wanted to see how that would work out), I wrote it in OCaml. The end result is a 3-5k LOC project. It's by no means a full compiler, but it was lots of fun to write. The language got in the way incredibly rarely. On average, it made my life a lot easier.

We did encounter our fair share of issues, mostly due to the cross-compilation tooling (we initially used esy [1], flirted with Nix, and eventually switched to opam-cross-ios [2]), third-party libraries, and intricacies of FFI. Those do take their toll on sanity.

[1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

What's the current status of Esy? https://github.com/esy/esy

Any plans to backport its design back to Opam?

It's great to hear that Opam is making progress! I just wished that it would be more deeply integrated with Dune. A package manager that doesn't build is not very useful to be honest. Currently the only way to not have to care about switches and be able to clearly specify dependencies is to use the esy package manager[1] (which had lock files a while ago).

[1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

If you start a project today I would really try to use esy (https://esy.sh/)

I actually don’t use it myself but it seems to bring the modern programming language experience to OCaml

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "esy"

Alternatively, you can use esy.sh for a simpler setup/build process (it does not require running in a Cygwin shell).

Running esy does not work. Apparently, my environment does not know that it is there. Anyone know what is going on here? I have posted this in the discussion for esy@next here. I will get back to you all when I figure this out.

Some of your questions might be answered in this book (free online version): https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

I don't think they're wrong

the Jane Street side are quite prolific with blog posts etc

as a newcomer to OCaml one of the first, and nicer-looking, intro resources you'll likely encounter is the Real World OCaml book https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ which unfortunately does everything using Base instead of the stdlib

Personally that didn't sit right to me and I prefer to use the stdlib by default (which seems fine and not in need of a wholesale replacement)

This is an oldie but a goodie.

OCaml has, unlike Standard ML, grown quite a lot since this page was made.

In particular, the section "Standard libraries", I'd recommend looking at:

https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

A couple of places where the comparison is outdated:

- OCaml using Base [1] allows for result-type oriented programming

- OCaml using Base uses less language magic and more module system

While there was and is truth to the distinction that SML is for scientists and OCaml is for engineers, this dichotomy is getting dated: OCaml is under active development, which means that scientists who want better tooling will choose OCaml. For example, 1ML [2] by Andreas Rossberg was built in OCaml.

[1]: https://opensource.janestreet.com/base/

Real World OCaml (version 2 is finally out) is also pretty good.

Real World OCaml is also a good resource, geared more towards people who already have some programming experience and want a more industry/practical focused learning experience.

ocaml.org’s new website is packed with lots of great early intros.

most learners eventually gravitate towards Real World OCaml https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ for additional learning.

Unfortunately, the learning resources for different domains out there isn’t as highly curated or prolific as, say, rust. If you do web dev like me, it takes a bit more work to find the tools and put them together. But the language itself lends itself well to systems level programming.

Fortunately, the forum is a great help.

In general, better read the second edition which is updated to use current Core versions. A print version was published recently.

I recommend https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ and https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/cover.html

Elm is not dead. It just prefers a slow release schedule but is still actively worked on in the background.

That said, you might want to check out OCaml for general purpose programming. Super fast compiler, great performance, can target both native and JS.

It is easier to use than Haskell due to defaulting to eager evaluation (like most languages) strategy instead of laziness and being generally more pragmatic, offering more escape hatches into the imperative world if need be. Plus great upward trajectory with lot's of cool stuff like an effects system and multi-core support coming.

Real World Ocaml is a decent resource: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/