F# VS ocaml

F# F*

This year I've been attempting Advent of Code in my favourite programming language, F#. This is a beginner(ish) centered post about making incremental changes from the smallest possible solution to something more robust.

I can recommend polyglot notebooks in vs code, so you can mix different languages.Take a look athttps://fsharp.org/ for some project ideas and frameworks.

I have many less followers on Mastodon than in the Birdsite (40 vs 341), yet my activity has generated many more interactions than there. Not only that, among the users who decided to interact with me I counted: a co-discoverer of the Laniakea supercluster, one of the lead developers behind F#, the author of many important books on Java & JVM, plus many others. I'm literally a nobody, but this time there was no algorithm relying on relevance and engament metrics to decide what to present to each one of us.

FP devs differ based on language here. Elm, like F#, tends to encourage "a bunch of functions and types in a file". While Elm supports modules, we don't really care where it came from; they're all pure, all deterministic, the compiler tells us if it works.

The builtin fsharp collections actually are just "immutable", not persistent as you mention. (Ref: https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/blob/master/src/fsharp/FSharp.Core/map.fs. This is just an AVL tree that returns a copy on mutations: https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/blob/577d06b9ec7192a6adafefd09ade0ed10b13897d/src/fsharp/FSharp.Core/map.fs#L118)

You can dive into .NET ecosystem by trying F#. It's functional-first language so this should be familiar.

ReScript code is just like F# or OCAML; it doesn’t have a function parse phase like JavaScript, so we have to define our functions and types first before we can use them. That’s fine, but makes explaining the code backwards (meaning you start at the bottom of the file and work your way up), so we’ll start at our lambda handler and explain each part, regardless of where it’s defined.

F# is a JavaScript and .NET language for web, cloud, data-science, apps and more.

Also a programming joke

> OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”

If that’s this OCaml, it has a configure.ac file in the root directory, which looks suspicious for an Autotools-free package: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml

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)

11. OCaml - $91,026

> 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.

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:

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

An amazing example is Ocaml lang logo / mascot. It might be useful to talk with them to know what was the process behind this work. The About page camel head on Perl dot org header is also a pretty good example of simplification, but it's not a logo, just a friendly illustration, as the O'Reilly camel is. Another notable logo for this animal is the well known tobacco industry company, but don't get me started on that (“good” logo, though, if we look at the effectiveness of their marketing).

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.

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.